All the best tunes?
by A.A. Pessimal
Summary: A possibly less controversial Good Omens FF that came to me when crazed with sleep towards the end of a long night shift when listening to sounds on my MP3. Crowley and Aziraphale as music-promoters in the 1960's...   chapter order slightly adjusted
1. A Time to Every Purpose

_**Groovy, man.**_

_A series of what will be interlinked shorts involving Crowley and Aziraphile in the 1960's and possibly a little bit beyond. They say if you can remember the 1960's you were never really there. But what if you had to be there and are cursed with remembering…_

_**1.) 960 B.C. Jerusalem. **_

King Solomon put down the lyre and looked around the throne-room for vindication. A handful of wives, perhaps twenty or thirty**(1), **burst into applause, as was expected of them. The usual languid and obsequious courtiers expressed approval. Even Sheba turned a lazy cat-like eye on him, even though this particular Song hadn't mentioned her even _once._

"What do you think?" the King Over Israel asked. He felt he had a right to be smug. It was one of his best so far, even if he said so himself.

"Solly, baby!" said Sheba. "That's gotta be a _hit_!"

"Almost as good as your father's Songs, sire." said a courtier. Under his King's glare, he hurriedly backtracked.

"Perhaps _even better_ than those of King David!"

The old king was long dead, after all. He could safely be relegated to second place as a writer of Songs. Even if his were better…..

Solomon beamed in their appreciation. Even as he lifted his lyre to give his adoring public an encore, he vaguely wondered where the wandering scholar had gone. The one who had given him the idea for the song. no, be honest, Solly. The one who had given him most of the _words._ And the _tune_. Seemed happy enough to be paid off with a sack of old scrolls. First drafts of Dad's that I was only going to throw out. But just for one moment I thought he was… Solomon shrugged. The time for angels and miraculous interventions was long past. His rabbis and Prophets all said so, after all.

Solomon frowned. Just for a moment he wanted to strike a discordant note and begin a new Song with a series of nonsense syllables. He strongly suspected some of them would applaud just as heavily if the Song began

_Yowtie buggetty, rum fing f-tooo, Niq! Niq! Niq! Yow-oooo!_

just because he was a bloody King.

But he focused. And sang…

**2.) Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco** . **Summer 1965**.

"_Just one more take, guys. Jim, Gene, David, we'll keep it in that key and tempo, that seems to work…"_

David Crosby nodded at Jim McGuinn and they lifted their guitars again . Crosby's twelve-string Rickenbacker jangled into the opening bars for what felt like the seventy-fifth time. Gene Clarke stepped up to the mic and he began cuing himself into the music.

_To everything (Turn, turn, turn)_

_There is a season (Turn, turn, turn)_

_And a time to every purpose under heaven…_

Crosby, a professional musician to his core, tried to make Take Seventy-Five as new and exciting as Take One. But a tiny bit of his mind was wondering about the Mysterious Stranger at the party, the slightly faggoty Englishman, who'd heard a Byrds tape, and thought this would be an ideal track for them to record.

"Trust me." the English fag had drawled, in his upper-class accent. "I'm an Angel."

Whatever he was, he'd talked them into it…

**3.) London. October 1965.**

Anthony Crowley returned to his flat from a _spreading-lust, avarice-and-greed_–trip to Carnaby Street, and tipped his bags out on the sofa. He couldn't call it _shopping_ as such, as he hadn't strictly speaking, actually _paid_ for anything. But it was amazing how a bit of charm and misdirection got him so many free samples. He grinned. The general dress sense, the floppy haircut with long sideburns, and the cool shades did it. Trendy film directors swooned, and pop impresarios were prone to asking Crowley if he could sing, and who he was signed up to..**(2)** As somebody who, wherever he went in London, had an "almost famous" sort of face, and an Attitude, trendy boutiques tripped over themselves in a fight to dress him. After all, he was famous for _something_, only nobody could remember exactly _what._ Any guy who looked like that _had_ to be famous. Look at John Lennon or Mick Jagger, who projected the same sort of vibe.

Crowley grinned. This was shaping up to be a good decade. He started checking out the new threads he'd acquired. Although he might pass on the nylon panties, which seemed a bit uncomfortably _tight_ as well as too frilly, the trousers and big-collared shirt ticked off his check-list as acceptably loud whilst satisfactorily avoiding squareness. He frowned. Were polka-dots or stripes in this week? He could never remember. But as it was generally black stripes on a black background, or very charcoal polka-dots on black, it was all a matter of detail anyway.

He willed the radio on.

It started paying that bloody song. _Ecclesiastes_. A book of the Bible, set to music. And it was a hit. People were buying it by the million. Hell had not been pleased…

CROWLEY! WE RECOGNISE THE HAND OF YOUR ADVERSARY, THE ANGEL AZIRAPHALE, IN THIS OUTRAGE. HE HAS SUCCEEDED IN GETTING HEAVEN'S MESSAGE INTO THE POP CHARTS AND INTO THE HEADS OF MILLIONS WHO WOULD NEVER KNOWINGLY TOUCH OR READ THE BIBLE. AND THIS IS ON TOP OF HIS SUBORNING CLIFF RICHARD TO THE CHRISTIAN MESSAGE! MAY WE ASK, CROWLEY, MAY WE INQUIRE, WHAT MEASURES _YOU_ ARE TAKING TO SPREAD THE WORD OF HELL TO THE MULTITUDES?

Registering a rebuke, Crowley had set about making up for lost time. there had been a pool-party at Mick's where he had planted a few ideas. That had been a good gig. He'd advised Brian to, for goodness sake, eat _something_ before going for a swim in freezing cold water. Brian Jones, who was almost permanently spaced out these days, and otherwise a vacuously good-looking youth who could play guitar a bit, had nodded acknowledgement before going off to share something with that singer from Cambridge, Syd something. Keith had tagged on, and Crowley had grinned. Brian might clean his act up, spontaneously grow out of the constant drugs and three-groupies-a-day, and live a long life. But Keith would surely do too much too quickly and die young, adding a few more good tunes to Hell.

"Tony?"

He looked up. A stunning blonde, with a _lights are on but nobody's home _look in her eyes, was standing over him.

"Can I get you anything, Tony?"

She wiggled her hips suggestively. Crowley sighed. He was six thousand years old, for goodness sake. Sex had lost a lot of its attractions for him. He'd done everything, at least twice. In his opinion it was a bit over-rated. Only a neurotically repressed nation like the British could think otherwise.

"No thanks, love. Not in the mood. You could.."

He felt a craving for something filling, sweet and sickly.

"Don't suppose you could get me a mars bar, could you?"

Her perfect face fell into puzzlement. Mick flounced up.

"Will you go and get the gentleman his mars bar, Marianne?" he demanded, in that rather fey way of his. If Crowley had not known better, he'd have taken Mick for being gay. The two shook hands as Marianne sashayed drunkenly off..

"So where are the others, then, Mick?"

Mick Jagger sighed.

"Bill's hanging around the local school trying to pick something up. Bad habit of his. And Charlie's locked himself in a room upstairs with a good book. I don't think he's temperamentally suited for the rock lifestyle, our drummer! Don't do groupies, he don't do drugs, he don't even drink much, but what he does do is _drum_. And bloody well, too. Now, Anthony, my man. Tell me more about this songwriting idea you had!"

Crowley grinned.

"Well, Mick. It occurred to me that there's an old acquaintance of mine who might be pleased if he could introduce himself to you one day. He could use some sympathy…."

Crowley remembered his old teacher, Dr Screwtape, at Tempters' Training College. A decent old buffer for a demon and one who had some surprisingly forward ideas.

Screwtape had predicted that _our catches will grow ever more numerous... as the great sinners grow fewer and the majority lose all individuality, the great sinners become ever more valuable... every dictator, every demagogue, every film-star, every crooner, will draw tens of thousands with him to us... there will become a time when we may not need to bother about individual tempatation at all, save for the few. Catch the bell-wether, and his whole flock comes after him_.

Mick Jagger was not a man who was easily impressed. But he treated Crowley with respect and courtesy, which was, as it eventually turned out, quite fitting.

As he sketched out his ideas for new songs to Mick, Crowley reflected on exactly how right Screwtape had been. Get the leader, and the rest of the herd go through the same sheep-dip. Everyone following gets at least a splash of sin. And what was Mick Jagger if not a leader and innovator, an ideas-man? Plant the right ideas…

_John Lennon next_, Crowley thought. _I've got a few ideas there, too. _

* * *

**(1) **They were part of the shift who worked Tuesdays. It gave most of the girls a one-day week, so they were all in favour of the arrangement.

**(2) **Crowley would, in fact, play with this idea a couple of years later when Peter Cook played a character very, very, like him in a movie. _**("Bedazzled",**_ the original 1967 release, accept no later American imitations) Forewarned, Crowley made absolutely sure it was a flattering portrayal. There is a scene where Cook, a deadpan comedian with above-average dark good looks, playing a demon posing as a plausibly good-looking pop star, sings the title track to a studio full of swooning girls. Crowley had done this himself in the original rough-cut to persuade Cook he could carry it off. _**Bedazzled**_ won Crowley a grudging demerit from an otherwise puzzled Hell, who (apart ffom Hastur and Ligur) weren't sure whether it was some sort of subtle piss-take.

I'm not footnoting all the references and annotations - there are lots and lots here condensed into a very short opening chapter. Do feel free to compile your own!


	2. Disguised as a Judy, without glasses

_**Groovy, Man**_

_A return to the idea of Crowley and Aziraphile as pop music promoters in the latter part of the 20th Century. _

_This started to slowly dawn on me as I contemplated an old joke about Karen Carpenter, Mama Cass Elliott and a ham sandwich which, alas, was never fated to be shared. Contemplating Lou Reed and many others: what else is a drug addiction but a form of Pollution… and the sound of a lönely cöwbell in an Alpine meadow led, by degrees, tö the Föurth. _

_The Four Riders Of The Storm who manifested separately to Jim Morrison. Being sophisticated constructs, the Four would have appreciated their own music too… so while an Angel and a Demon may appear as cameos in this part of the story, the main players and directors of human foibles are the Four. _

_We begin shortly after the formal end of (official) hostilities in World War Two. _

_**i) "Who's that Judy with the red hair?"**_

Mick Harkness snarled as he stepped up to the uniformed Army tailor with the tape measures. It was October 1947. TWO BLOODY YEARS after the war was supposed to have finished. And only now, for Mick Harkness, was it finally going to be over. Conscripted in 1943 and leaving London at age seventeen, pulled out of his comfortable if bomb-damaged Southwark. Six months of training later, in every expectation that he was off to fight Hitler in Italy, which he reasoned wouldn't be too bad a deal if he could wangle a rear-echelon job, he had got the bad news. They'd all been on deck on the troopship, anticipating the driver would turn left at Gib for Malta, North Africa or the war front in Italy.

_Attention. This is your captain speaking. _There had been an attentive pause from the two thousand soldiers on board. Now they'd know…._You have all been led to believe you were being sent to the Central European front as reinforcements to British First Army in Italy. This was intentional. You are in fact on the long run to join British Fourteenth Army in Burma. Our earnest apologies. We continue to hope you will appreciate the voyage…_

There had been the briefest of stops ashore at Casablanca, where unit-by-unit the men had been marched to a base depot, surrendered their European khaki, and had been re-issued the jungle green of the Far East. Then onboard they had been schooled and lectured as to the quality and mentality of the third Axis principal, the Japanese. Harkness and others, growing gloomier with every lecture, deciding they were never going to let themselves be taken prisoner by the Japs, not after what they'd heard from the ex-PoW who'd managed to escape and do a home run.

Harkness had survived the mad vengeful recapture of Burma from a shattered Japanese army. He had heard the war was over in Europe, and had cursed his bad luck in being in the part of it that was poised to go on and on without end. He had been on the front line, poised to drive on and recapture Malaya and Singapore when the Yanks had dropped the bomb, and the Japanese war was suddenly over.

But he did not get the swift repatriation to England that he'd hoped for. Oh no. Harkness and his increasingly vocally disaffected Londoners were sent to the Dutch East Indies to maintain civil authority there. With the Dutch spent after five years of German occupation, this meant the British having to step in, act as agents for a fellow colonial power, and prevent native guerrillas taking over and exploiting the power vacuum. Incredibly, the Japanese soldiers who had formerly occupied the island for the Emperor were re-armed and fought here under British orders to put down a native revolution.

And after Indonesia…

Harkness stood in the cool aircraft hangar that was being used as a demobilisation centre. It was finally over. The elderly tailor was taking his measurements. Soon there would be demob suits. Two full sets, a gift of civilian clothing from a grateful Army to set him up in Civvy Street.

"So where else were you posted in the East?" the tailor asked, making polite conversation. Harkness counted down the landmarks. Calcutta. Hogg Market, Kohima. Imphal. Sittang Bend. Mandalay. Rangoon. Sumatra. And then the one that made them feel uneasy, the more so because it had been relatively peaceful, the one they had felt would explode into _real_ shooting war sooner or later. The one they couldn't wait to hand back to the French, when deGaulle had imperiously asked Atlee for our colony back, if you would be so kind. Oh, there had been odd little bits of shooting between us and the… _Viet Cong_? – but in the main, this devious little bugger Ho Chi Minh had been happy to bide his time, be helpful, and put up with a British garrison.

"Vietnam." said Harkness, thinking of the better things – the local scran in Saigon, the beauty and availability of the women, the quiet peaceful beach at DaNang where they had gone for R&R.

"Never heard of it." said the tailor.

"No reason why you should." said Harkness. "It's the bloody French, innit, we had to look after their bloody Empire for them. Well, they got it back now, so if it gets broken it's their problem, know what I mean?"

* * *

_And after a brief stop-over in French Indochina, where some minds were seeded with ideas for the future, Red was now in the northern half of Korea, a country riddled with competing factions and the machinations of their supporting superpowers. She was in a place where red was the dominant colour, in fact, whispering ideas to a warlord whose thinking combined the egalitarian ideals of Communism with the Korean notion that a powerful man should found a family dynasty, and groom his sons for power after him… _

…_but even as she drew a line across the Korean peninsular and counselled Kim-Il_Sung to make the land north of it into his fiefdom, she was thinking _**I've been at this ever since 1936 and the Manchurian Intevention. This is what I was made for and these have been the best years of my existence. But I really need a holiday. **

_Red thought, as she sat alone on Mount Baekdu, some way off from the Great Leader. _**The thing I really do not want is the really big one, with these new bombs. They're proof you can have too much of a good thing and I don't want to see these people destroy themselves. They amuse me. Well, not till Armageddon, anyway. And the world is destabilised, there's no question about that. The old colonial powers are going to realise Empire days are all up and their day is over. And the East has now seen a "native" people humble the white masters. The Dutch will be first to realise the spell is over and the East Indies does not want them back. The British have a nasty shock in store in Malaya and Borneo. And the French, the poor French. Their pride will not allow them to concede Vietnam. **

She sighed. Behind and around her, a political debate, as to whether Juchi should have twenty or twenty-three governing principles, was getting _intense. _

**I can possibly get by on a diet of small wars for quite some time to come**, she thought. **The quality of the weaponry, and the greater productivity it enables… but after spending so long spoiling them with the big things, it might be advantageous to go back to basics. Down to the grass roots, to remind them, to refresh them, concerning all the little negative emotions and dysfunctional interactions that eventually build and escalate into war. In situations where they don't even think about fighting, but which can be war by any other name… Sport. Music. Entertainment. **

War smiled a contented smile and looked out down the Chilo valley over Korea. **Such a naturally beautiful country…**

* * *

_**London, 1949: **_

Mick Harkness had got a trade as a barrow boy. So near the docks, he had arrangements with quite a few dockers as to sought- after items that would fetch good money. Selling both on and off ration, he wasn't doing too badly and was working towards fulfilling an ambition. Dockers and sailors also brought in other things, like magazines and newspapers from America.

America. A country untouched by war or enemy action. A place that seemed to have intercepted and absorbed all the wealth and vitality that had fled Britain. Like thousands, he read avidly about all things American. It was an escape to a land of plenty, from a grey Britain still suffering from rationing of all essential items, four years after the end of hostilities. Indeed, somewhere a radio or a phonogram was playing some old Glen Miller, _The American Patrol. _Harkness listened to the upbeat instrumental, his foot tapping. There was a linking passage somewhere in the middle that sounded a bit _spare_ for a big band: just one sax supported by drums and upright bass, the big band rhythm stripped down to its absolute essentials. The whole piece, when you listened to it that way, somehow sounded experimental, as if the composer had had a glimmering of a whole, different, sort of music… Harkness frowned. Then the music turned into _Sliphorn Jive_, and he nodded again, more sure of where he was. You could not go _wrong_ with a jive…

"Hey, Mikey!"

"Don, my man!"

The two exchanged handshakes and grins, both barely twenty-five, both war veterans, both now semi-disaffected Londoners in insecure occupations discovering they weren't quite living in a land fit for heroes.

"Got the stuff?"

"Only a few mags and photos, I'm afraid. Bloody rationing. You need a lot of material for a decent Zooter."

They leant on the cart together and shared a cigarette. Both had heard of Zoot suits, the American innovation. While not a recent idea, their counterparts in the USA wore the loud flamboyant, fabric-extravagant Zoot Suit because they could. Young men who had lived for a few years under military conformity because they had to were now wearing the Zoot to advertise their independence, to advertise the fact they would never live under such conformity ever again.

Only a few such Zoot Suits had got as far as London. Britain's ongoing rationing included fabrics for clothing. A Zoot Suit needed up to 30% more fabric than a conventional suit. Unless you had a way to get around rationing, it simply wasn't practicable in England in 1949. If you wanted to express rebellion, this was frustrating. You could experiment with letting your hair grow longer and have it styled unconventionally – at least barbers weren't rationed – but you soon got the idea people were looking at you, policemen's eyes narrowed when they saw you, and employers made veiled threats to sack you. You had to be self-employed or a student or just not care to take this route. But some of the Zoot Suiters in the States favoured what they called the _ducktail…_ a style that rose up in front and flopped over at the back, making it look in silhouette as if a duck had perched on your head. These were starting to be seen in London. It was clear the same sense of dissatisfaction and anti-authoritarianism was there, in spades, over England. But in 1949 its outlets were few and embryonic.

Mick and his friend Don looked at each other ruefully. Conscripted and demobbed together, their Army demob clothing was still at home, kept in the wardrobe for whenever it was needed. For everyday work they still favoured the hard-working military trousers and tunics that had become a part of them over the war years. They weren't unusual in this – every second man still seemed to be wearing at least one item of their old service uniform, out of comfort, ease and a desire to save clothing coupons needed for rationed civilian clothing.**(1)**

But both men yearned for Zoot Suits, as an outward expression of inward rebellion. Neither knew it would be quite a while yet before they got something comparable. In the meantime, anything American, about male fashion and hairstyling, that Mick could scrounge up at the docks, went to fuel the fantasy and need. A copy of _**"Time"**_ in which the Zoot Suiters were denounced as a threat to the American family and society was a prize possession, because of its illustrations. They went out, unmarried men exploiting a temporary surplus of hopeful women, to dances and concerts by bands that re-hashed the big band music of the forties. But what had sounded big and new and exciting in 1942 when played by visiting Americans like Glen Miller now sounded old and stale. The world, in an admittedly uneasy peacetime, needed a new soundtrack.

"They're talking about ending clothing rationing later this year, aren't they?" Don asked. "Old Manny at the schmatter shop was excited about that,"

Mick shrugged.

"You've still got to buy the schmatter by the yard and pay Old Manny's sort of rates to get him to make it up for you." he pointed out. "Don't come cheap, that."

* * *

_**Reno, Nevada, 1952:-**_

The Saddlemen were booked to play three sets that Saturday night. After the first, Bill and Johnny Grande stood out back of the venue and looked out into the desert night.

"We need a new idea, Johnny." Bill said, quietly. Johnny Grande looked at his old friend with sympathy. Bill was good-looking in a classic all-American way, oval face, indented chin, and a floppy cowlock of hair hanging over a good-natured face. Girls liked him as the sort of solid reliable guy they could take with confidence to see their parents.

"Or we'll just be rehashing the same few country standards all our lives as musicians and doing the same venue circuit all our lives."

Johnny had a lot of cowboy in his blood. He thought hard before replying.

Right now we're a country band. And Lord knows, that's a hard nut to crack. If you want my opinion, Bill, this here band needs to diversify. To do other music. Did I mention this _rockabilly _idea? We carry on doing country music, but we change the beat and we add horns and we perform it faster. Git folks up and _dancin'. "_

"Then we ain't a country band no more. Can't call ourselves the Saddlemen no more."

Johnny had an answer there too.

And a band whose repertoire included memorable songs like "Yodel your blues away" along with a host of country standards spent a day in a recording studio, doing different. Their first song in the new rockabilly medium was called _**Rocket 88.**_ It touched the low levels of Billboard for a week or two and then faded out _Like some sort of comet, Bill said. _They auditioned for a bass player. Al Rex turned up. Afterwards, Bill the lead singer, Johnny the keyboards player and Billy the drummer turned to each other and said "I don't know what the Hell that was, but it was sure different."

"Did he actually try to _climb_ that there bass, or did I imagine it?"

Al was in.

And their next single was called _**Rock the Joint. **_It charted.

"It'll be another comet." Bill Haley grumbled.

"Haley's Comet." agreed Johnny.

The band members looked at each other. Bill Haley And His Saddlemen was getting to be less and less of an appropriate name for a rockabilly band as it moved further away from country. But the Comets…

And the band invested in what would become its trademark: matching Zoot suits in a loud tartan plaid…

And there was another hit. A monster hit. And an invitation to do the soundtrack for a Hollywood movie on youth disaffection. And a European tour.

Rockabilly music had arrived. And Bill Haley and his Comets were the pop music world's first supergroup.

* * *

_**London, 1954**_

Clothing had come off ration in April, 1949. Within months, disaffected British youth could be seen adopting tribal uniforms.

Strangely enough, the American idea of the Zoot Suit was given a particularly British mutation, not so much originated by disaffected teenagers and younger war veterans, as by a section of society with nothing to complain about at all.

Off-duty Guards Division officers based on Chelsea Barracks and Buckingham Palace spearheaded a craze among the wealthy for dressing like Edwardian fops. Savile Row tailors were only too pleased to show what they could do with unlimited material and money. The tapered trousers were common with the Zoot suit, as were aspects of the long jackets, but the fancy waistcoats were a throwback to the England of the early 1900's. And for the monied classes, there was a pride in getting the small historical details perfect.

For the unmonied classes who wanted the Edwardian Boy look, the zoot suit was a valid starting point. And not being dandy young Army officers, they could freely wear the ducktail hairstyle, one soon dignified with a more earthy British name. Mick and Don found themselves the Elder Statesmen of the gang, the median age of which was around eighteen. At first the papers called them the Cosh Boys. Then the phrase "Teddy Boys" appeared as if from nowhere. And it stuck.

Whatever the name, the lads were gratified that their new look drew the choicest judies, girls who like them were in colourful rebellion against austerity, authority and conformity. The thirty members of the Southwark Teds, male and female, became an arresting sight around the Elephant and Castle in the early and middle 1950's, an ongoing affront to authority and a two-fingered gesture to decency and propriety.

Mick reflected that most of the time the Southwark group were peaceable. Well, unless we ran into those tossers from Lambeth. And those bastards from Bermondsey deserved a good kicking too. And that arsey bloody copper who'd nicked Greg, well, we ain't forgotten, copper.

On that night they were doing nothing more inoffensive than going to the cinema. The film itself was called _**Blackboard Jungle **_and hadn't been rated greatly., But that didn't matter., The soundtrack was by this American bloke called Bill Haley and his band and it was said to be totally crazy, man.

They arrived to an increasingly nervous cinema management who had belatedly realised that the Teds and Judies of four London manors were all under his roof to watch an inflammatory and morally suspect American film. Mick and Don nodded guardedly friendly greetings to the leaders of the other groups, and by some telepathy the message was received that nobody was here for a fight. Let's just enjoy the movie.

Accounts as to what happened next are confused.

All that can reliably said is that the cinema was trashed. Even though the respective gangs of Teds had called a truce, some say the music and the beat were too much. The moment _"See You Later Alligator"_ and "_Rock Around The Clock_" started… two hundred Teds and Judies got up ands started dancing in the cinema aisles.

This was despite the manager's frenzied bleating of _"'Ere! You can't do that! That's illegal! I ain't licenced for public dancing!" _

Other accounts point at the Mystery Judie, the redhead who had arrived dressed all in red, on the arm of the black-clad Ted who'd been wearing sunglasses indoors for some poncey reason. Nobody, but nobody, was going to mess with the black-clad Ted in the sunglasses, who oozed cool from every pore.

And the Judy had got up and danced with everyone. And for some reason Mick had felt the urge to get the old Shiv of Last Resort out, and start slashing seats, yanking the horsehair filling out in all directions as the band played on up on screen. And around the Red Judy, others were getting the same idea, as the cinema manager wept for the destruction and the louche black-clad Ted grinned.

And Red Judy danced, her skirt spiralling up and about her waist as she spun, all long long legs and flying red hair and a perfect body… and those she touched and danced with and spun were in turn affected by the mood and wanted to destroy something.

And Mick Harkness half-glimpsed a Ted all in white, who took a stance opposite the Black Ted and who seemed to look on disapprovingly…

_And this is what you dragged me out to, Crowley? You and War together? And incidentally, this style of clothing is really vulgar! _

_Come off it, Angel, all you needed do was go into your wardrobe and blow the mothballs off what you were wearing in 1910. I had to have this rig made up bespoke. And it wasn't easy to find the material or a decent tailor! _

And Red Judy danced on, around the clock, enjoying herself and cheering and whooping.

_Such nice boys, _she thought, indulgently_. And learning a lesson or two about aggression and destruction and the need to break things. And so much sexual energy in the air getting transmuted. Pangenitor and Panphage all in one. _

She felt no guilt. _That fat drab little man in the suit is insured. And all these boys will be doing National Service and sent off to fight for Britain. Better they learn a little about aggression now so they can use it for real in Malaya or Kenya or Aden or wherever else Britain is fighting a war right now. They'll thank me for it, if they knew. _

She performed a series of high-kicking twirls down the aisle, all flying legs and swinging hips, arousing the jealousy and envy of lesser Judies and the despairing raging lust of the Teds.

Crowley grinned contentedly and drank in the hot fresh sins. This was Hell. And he was enjoying it.

Meanwhile, Aziraphile prevented the rival Ted gangs from going for each other, diverting their stabbing rages to the upholstery instead. The police said afterwards that it was a mystery and a blessing how with four youth gangs in attendance, nobody was killed or seriously injured.

But then, when the police turned up and made seventy-six arrests, neither Angel, Demon nor Anthropomorphic Personification of War was there to be seen.

_There's something about this new music, Angel. It changes people._

_Agreed. And in all probability it's here to stay and it may never die. We need to watch this, Crowley. _

_It's got to be one of yours, isn't it? Something to cheer them all up and make them feel less deprived? Spreading a bit of Heaven, are we?_

_Well, we thought it was one of **yours**, to be honest. It appeals to base lusts and desires, provokes displays of violence, questions and challenges established order... _

War stepped between them, glowing with exertion, and linked arms with both.

_But for now, you boys can both take me for a drink somewhere. I really enjoyed that! _

* * *

And in his prison cell, Mick Harkness, war veteran, grinned with pleasure, even though a magistrate would soon tell him that at the age of twenty-nine he should have developed maturity and strength of character and have shown a positive example to the younger people who had gathered around him. _You signally failed to do so, and therefore I sentence you to…_

But it had been a good night. A hell of a night. And if he ever met Red Judy again he'd propose to her.

* * *

_More to come from the points of view of Famine, Pollution/Pestilence and Death himself! _

**(1) **Really true. Cartoon layabout Andy Capp was born in the early 1950's. For the first ten years of the cartoon, he still wears his old Army greatcoat, with _**D.L.I.**_ – Durham Light Infantry – on the shoulderpatch. This was not uncommon in a Britain where clothes and the material to make clothes did not come off ration until 1949 and even after this were scarce, a fact I will demonstrate is important.


	3. Fantasia in Birmingham: Faust in Aston

_**Aston, Birmingham. 1969.**_

_Inspired by the BBC4 documentaries on the LP **Paranoid **and the life of the singer formerly known as John Osbourne. Yes. I know it's not "Slipping..." or "Civilian Asistant". But I had to write this..._

"You've really _got_ to do that, Geezer?" Ozzie asked, pointedly. It was meant to be a band rehearsal afternoon. But Geezer, the bass player, had been obsessed, seemingly, with one short passage, endlessly playing it over and over again. Somebody with a classical music education might have recognised _Mars, _from the Planet Suite, by Holst. But sounded out on a bass guitar broadcasting through a rehearsal amp, it lacked a certain something.

Geezer grinned, sheepishly. He'd been down in Sparkbrook earlier that day, where Enoch Powell had just been making a speech to the local Tory Party.**(1) **The pigs had been out in force outside keeping the usual suspects at bay, the trots and hippies on one side, the skins and the National Front types to the other, and it had got heavy, all kicks and punches and truncheons and flying bricks. Geezer had sort of _glimpsed_ this red-haired chick dressed all in red, she was walking through the fight like it was a stroll through the meadow, and this memory of a tune he'd once heard an orchestra play was suddenly in his head. He just couldn't shift it. You know?

Tony started picking the theme out on his guitar. It altered and mutated and changed, so that only somebody who knew the secret could ever tell it had begun as Holst's hymn to the Planet of War. Geezer and Bill fell in with him, happy to have something to work with. Even Ozzie joined in, improvising lyrics.

"_When you kiss Satanic asses; just like witches at black masses..."_

"Yeah, guys. We might have something we can work with there." Ozzie eventually said, grudgingly. He had long greasy biker hair and very rarely wore shoes. It had begun as part of childhood poverty; now it was an affectation. The other three members of the band known, for now, as The Earth, put up with it, just as they put up with Ozzie's physical smell.

* * *

Don Arden sighed. He thought of himself as an easy-going sort of a man who was slow to rise to provocation. But some of these jumped-up pop singers could make a saint angry. _Who did this little herbert think he was!_

Don looked back over his shoulder to where his daughter was still sitting at his desk, finishing her school homework, seemingly oblivious of what Daddy was doing at the window. _Good, _he thought. _If this little bastard's frightened my little Princess, I'm letting go..._

From somewhere below windowsill level there came a frightened whimper. _Good enough, _Don decided, and he pulled the hapless trembling youth – the lead singer with a middle-ranking pop group - back into the room, three floors above the street.

"Told you I had the strength of ten men in these hands." he said, affably. "But I tell you, sonny. The very next time you disagree with my management of your ten-for-a-penny pop group, the next time you allege I'm cheating you on the money, then I'm bloody well letting go, you got that? Now... " he bent down and whispered in the boy's ear) "_Fuck off. _Got that?"

As the youth fled, Don smiled at his daughter. Sharon, a rather plain dumpy girl, smiled back. There was genuine affection there; father and daughter adored each other. _Just let any of them, any of those greasy biker hippie types, come sniffing anywhere near my Sharon, my princess! _he vowed.

* * *

The Earth finished jamming at eleven that night, following forcefully expressed protests by neighbours. The four band members sat nursing a beer each, four precious bottles for which they'd just about been able to scrounge up the cash. It tasted warm and unappetising, but they drank it anyway.

"I'm not happy about Don Arden". Bill, the drummer, was regarded as the most sensible head, next to the bass player. "You hear _stories,_ you know? Any manager but him, guys."

"They say he hangs people out of the window if they disagree about the share of the take from gigs." added Tony, the guitarist.

"He's broken guitarists' fingers before now." Bill reflected.

"He'd have a job with mine." Earth's guitar player reflected. It was true. Tony Iommi never got callouses or blisters on his fingertips, either. He was _favoured_, in some vital respects. What had been a calamity involving a metalworking band-saw and several of his fingertips was something he had learnt to play for advantage. His old boss in the metalworking plant had urged him to look up a geezer called Django Rheinheardt. Realising, Tony had crafted replacement slip-over fingertips for himself – like that geezer in the myth who made himself a whole new hand – and re-learnt the guitar.

"And when the Nashville Teens got people of their own in to count the numbers going to their gigs, and they realised mr Arden hadn't been counting straight, so the band was being paid on the basis of two thousand people buying tickets and not three thousand..."

"What he skimmed off was being split between Mr Arden and the gig management." Bill completed. "And when the band complained he held the lead singer out the window by his ankles and threatened to let go!"

"And you want us to sign contracts with _him_?" demanded Geezer. "I'd rather sign a contract with Satan, I'd get a more honest deal!"

_Something passing by not far away sensed the flow of the words. It read the intent and the desire behind them. It grinned a certain grin. Hell had recently berated him for being behind on his performance targets..._

"I wouldn't call Don Arden an unscrupulous crook or a thief or a bastard." the lead singer commented. John Osbourne took his time thinking about things, but he got there in the end. "'Least, not if I wanted to be able to walk straight and keep all me own teeth, you know what I'm saying? But right now he's our best bet, I mean, guys, he's the only manager to have taken an interest in us!"

There was an uneasy silence. The sort of dark, loud, blues-rock Earth played was a bit rich for the Birmingham scene. Other Birmingham groups had toned it down a bit and played a more pop-blues idiom that was far more marketable and was even scoring hits in the charts. They all knew, for instance, Roy Wood, the bastard, and the success he was having with his band The Move. Don Arden might have been a shite, true, but he'd made sure the first tune played on the brand-new Radio One had been one of _his_. Roy Wood had never looked back, especially after losing that daffy ginger-haired guitarist with the funny teeth. If that berk ever had a single in the charts, it'd be a cold day in Hell. Nice guy, could tell a funny story, but not a pop group member – no looks, no charisma.

And the Moody Blues, peace and love hippy bastards, hadn't looked back since shedding that useless guitarist Denny Laine and getting that male model type up front, not just a pretty face and a poncy name, Justin Hayward really could sing and play guitar a bit. And by all accounts, the rejected Denny was making a career as a sessions man and odd-jobber. Probably all he'd ever get.

"Moody Blues my arse. The M&B Five!" John Osbourne said, turning the beer bottle in his hand. It was true the Moody Blues in their origins had been a group of workers at the Mitchell and Butlers' brewery who had asked their bosses to subsidise a pop group. Hence the prominent MB in the name. "_Nights in white effin' _**_satin_ (2).** If we end up playing shit like that, guys, shoot me!"

There was a reflective pause.

"I'd still rather sign to Satan." Tony Iommi said. He read a lot of stuff on the occult and witchcraft in his spare time. As a former steelworker on invalidity benefit, he had a lot of spare time.

"Yeah, guys" said John Osbourne. "I don't know about you, but I'm tired of being poor. Had it all my life, I've prayed to Jesus, I'm still poor, so He's evidently not listening, you dig? So maybe we should give the other side a go!"

_Ah! _

Geezer Butler had packed up his bass and his amp. He finished his beer and stood up.

"Sorry, guys" he said. The red-haired chick in Sparkbrook had spooked him enough for one day._ Had he seen an angel? A demon? Something other people weren't meant to see, like the black-cowled figure he'd woken up to see standing at the foot of his bed some nights? Well, if these things came in threes, the last thing he wanted to see was Satan himself. _

He made his excuses and left. But just for a fleeting instant on the road, as he walked home in a deserted Aston night, he saw, or thought he saw... he hastened his steps and walked on.

* * *

"How do you do it, then?" asked Bill Ward. "I mean, it's not as if the Devil's going to walk in with a contract for you to sign, the moment you ask him, is he?"

_Anthony Crowley smiled and waited for his cue. He read the psychic atmosphere. _

"You gotta _pray_." said Osbourne. "Lord Satan, we who are gathered here today worship you and call upon you, sort of thing, that you may come unto us and grant riches and women and unlimited beer and drugs and shit, as we are fucking tired of being poor, and quite frankly the other side ain't done much, however hard we ask..."

In the anteroom to the public rooms where the Earth had been rehearsing, Crowley found the fuse-box and let his mind interact with it. He still wasn't entirely sure whether Hell's accountancy department would consider offering the Dark Pact to a bunch of scruffy no-hope dreamers was a truly cost-effective way of getting three, maybe four souls, but, hey, that was not the point. The point was, they'd renounced Heaven and asked Hell to manifest. Which meant the Angel couldn't do a blessed thing if he were about. Hell had an even more completely free hand than usual to act in this Birmingham. He grinned, and told the fusebox to shut itself down. As every light in the building snapped off and at least one member of the Earth screamed in the dark, Crowley let himself in. He stood and waited in the darkness, watching the expressions on their faces.

"_Guys? Guys? I don't think we're on our own, guys!"_ somebody quavered.

Crowley grinned, allowing the discomfort and fear to build up. He read the four while he silently waited. He grinned. Aziraphile had been quiet in the Music Wars just lately** (3).** He, Crowley, had got the Stones to release S_ympathy For The Devil _to great acclaim,and George Harrison was spreading the Hare Krishna message through song. If he could get a house band together for the Devil's0message... it might not necessarily be _this_ lot, but he sensed after this, Earth were soon going to get a whole new direction.

Lazily, Crowley called eldrich light into existence. He allowed the three would-be rockers to look upon him as he normally walked the world. Then he showed them his eyes. Then he said, affably

"Please allow me to introduce myself..."

* * *

A long time later, during the Black and Blue Tour, late at night after a shared gig, Tony Iommi tried to explain to Eric Bloom and Buck Dharma, from the Blue Öyster Cult, what he had seen that night and what had happened. Buck, at heart a rational kinda guy, but one brought up as a conservative Jew and therefore schooled to seriously consider, analyze and debate the existence of sentient evil in the world, was in two minds about it. Eric was sold. He remembered an experience of his own that he'd never quite been able to pass off as a dream.

"Describe the guy." he said. Tony obliged. Eric had a moment of clear vision. "God_**damn**_." he said. "That's the guy I met. **(4) **Did he give a name?"

"He said he was from Lucifer".Tony said. "I told him my name and he said it was a coincidence, some of his friends call him Tony too."

* * *

None of the Earth had doubted they were in the presence of something Satanic. There was just enough menace oozing out of the cool dude in black with the sunglasses to say he was Something Else.

Ozzie Osbourne had tried, in his usual amiable "three-beats-behind-everyone-else" sort of way, to work out who or what the dark figure standing before him was.

After a long quiet period in which all the three felt they were being dispassionately scrutinised, the figure in black pointed a finger at him, as if Ozzie was some sort of Chosen One. He felt his legs going to jelly and couldn't have run, even had he wanted to.

"Oh no, no, no, please God help me!"

"Too late for that." Crowley said, wincing. "You summoned me, remember. You..." Crowley concentrated. "John Oswald "Ozzie" Osbourne. And I'm not going back without something of value."

Crowley knew the value of theatrics. As the unhealthy eldrich light played and ebbed and flowed, he called a cold fire into existence, mainly for the show of the thing. He knew the red of the flames was reflecting in his glasses, flickering red against the black glass...

_(The Red and the Black, _thought Eric Bloom, some years later. Wonder if we can work this into the song? **(5))**

"What is it you want, oh mighty Dark Lord?" a Brummie voice quavered.

Crowley grinned. He'd forgotten how much fun a good Dark Contract sale could be.

"We can cut a deal here, guys." He stepped forward and put a companionable arm around Ozzie's shoulders, trying to ignore the habitual smell of unwashed feet, unwashed hair, unwashed clothes and a general miasma of neglect. **(6)**

"You want to be _rich_, right? You're fed up with being poor, right? And you have faith that the organisation for which I work can put right that deficiency? Well, you've come to the right demon!"

He flourished three Immortal Soul contracts.

"Standard deal." Crowley said, cheerfully. "Just sign here, here and here – just need a dab of blood from each of you boys - and everything you ever wanted will begin coming to you. For the rest of your lives."

"Everything?" asked Tony, slightly sceptical. His finger throbbed from where the demon – guy – had pricked it with his fountain pen and he could have sworn the bloody thing had sucked up some of his blood. Did you get vampire pens?

"Well, you've got to work at it." Crowley said. "You know? You're a pop group. Start doing gigs. Making records. You might find I pop up here and there just to... facilitate. And could whoever signed as Donald Duck please take this seriously and sign it with his real name? _Thank_ you."

It was the blood and not the signature that sealed the bargain, Crowley knew. That was better than a signature, more personal. But there was still mundane filing to think of. Dagon, Lord of the Files, insisted field agents got the fine details absolutely right. Or stiff snotty memos were sent out. Past clients had evaded round-up because their Immortal Soul contracts had been misfiled and lost. The Management had not been happy. Several had made it to Heaven in the ensuing bureaucratic confusion. Hell had asked for their extradition, but Heaven was invoking deathbed repentance and last-minute change of heart as justification for keeping them. Then again, they would.

Crowley folded up and pocketed the contracts. Then he nodded and made to exit, wanting to get away from the smell of sweat and old beer and Ozzie. Bill Ward cleared his throat.

"How do we _know_ you're the Devil? I mean, you could have just walked in off the street and you're havin' us on. Or you're something to do with that daft prat, used to be in the Move, the one who's into practical jokes."

Crowley sighed. It wasn't just Heaven who found Doubting Thomases were hard work.

"You know, Bev Bevan and Roy Wood's mate. Red-haired ugly tosser."

Crowley briefly considered maggots. Lots of maggots. Then he realised he now had to nurture these guys. He'd made the investment. He focused. The trick was easy enough and could be done by anyone of demonic or angelic stock.

"What's his _name_? Oh yeah, got it now. Bob Davies."

"Old carrot-head Davies? Rides that shitty little moped?{_pause_} Is that beer?"

All eyes swivelled round to the suddenly overflowing bottles. Crowley nodded.

"Simple trick. The other side does it with wine. On me. Any more questions? No? Then I'll be back."

As an afterthought, Crowley called a bar of soap and an underarm deodorant into existence and dropped them near Ozzie. Then he left.

The three remaining members of The Earth drank deep and made a quiet unspoken promise not to mention this again, to anyone, anywhere, at least not for a while. With crowley gone, doubts were beginning to set in as to exactly what had happened. It was a very human response.

"Soap?" Ozzie burst out. "Why's the bloody Devil given me soap, eh? People keep giving me soap. They _know_ I never use it, it's bad for the skin!"

* * *

Later that night Crowley appeared to Geezer Butler, manifesting as a dark shrouded figure standing at the foot of his bed. Just so he didn't feel left out. He got a fourth signature that way, and commented in passing that it's a wonder anyone around here can get any sleep at night, what with those bloody iron foundries and steel mills going _bang... thrummm...bang! _All night.

Butler digested this. He also heard the industrial noise as a strange kind of music, a Birmingham foundryman, the _heavy metal _speaking to him. In his head, rhythms and themes formed around the backdrop of the _bang... thrummm...bang! _

* * *

_A_nd Tony Iommi went to the movies. A Hammer Horror flick was playing at the Aston Odeon. He thought back to the strange incident at the end of the band practice. The Devil always went to exotic foreign places, right? Like Transylvania. He conceded that Satan could probably come to Birmingham if he wanted, there was nothing to stop him, but how likely was **that**? As vast riches, fame and adoring women had unnacountably failed to materialise the next day, It was most likely they'd been conned, someone working a practical joke, maybe taking advantage of Ozzie being an eight-ball short of a pool table. Maybe it was that little get Bob Davies. Don Arden had chucked him off Bev Bevan's band as a price of managing them, claiming anyone who looked as ugly as that was box-office poison. And Davies was a joker**...(7)**

Trying to remember the outlandish name the carrot-headed Davies was now performing under, Iommi looked at the name of the film.

_Black Sabbath._

And another neuron fired...

* * *

"Germany?" Ozzie Osbourne burst out. Don Arden threw him an impatient and unfriendly look. From a man built like a kosher gorilla, it was intimidating.

"Germany. Hamburg. You scruffy gits have got something. Don't know what it is, probably the Black Death. But you need to serve an apprenticeship. So I'm signing you to the Reeperbahn for ten months. Board and two meals a day thrown in, and that's _generous_. You repay me your travel out your first pay cheques, six days a week, three forty-five minute sets a day. Practice, get a few good sets together, write songs, and I might even let you do an album when you get home. Sign HERE, here are the tickets, now piss off, out of my sight."

Ozzie Osbourne was very lucky. Don Arden did not spot the grin and the leery wink he flashed at the young girl, couldn't have been more than sixteen, sitting in his office. Bit dumpy and plain, but hey, you gotta practice hadn't you?

Behind her father's back, the seventeen year old Sharon Arden flushed slightly but returned Ozzie's wink, revelling in the delicious danger of it. She thought he was quite good-looking, in a greasy biker sort of way...**(8)**there would be time, in the future. And Daddy wanted to teach her the business of music promotion and talent-spotting...

* * *

_**Question: do I end it here with a lot of things hinted at and left unsaid, or do I carry on? **_

_**A lot is said about Liverpool and Manchester as cradles of British pop music and it would all be true, but Birmingham, the unloved ugly sister, is forever left out despite having contributed as many big names to the rolls as Liverpool and Manchester put together. Birmingham and the wider West Midlands have given the world the Moody Blues (cod philosophy delivered in sightly brummie accents... listen to Mike Pinder reciting poetry on any early LP and try not to grin...). Denny Laine, who left the Moody Blues to become Paul McCartney's new guitarist of preference. Slade. Lemmy Kilminster. The Move. Wizzard. The Electric Light Orchestra. UB40. Duran Duran. The early Move member Bob Davies, who dropped out of rock altogether and found a more lucrative career as comedian Jasper Carrot. And of course Birmingham's best-loved Satanists, Black Sabbath. Many of these bands were managed by feared and somewhat corrupt promoter Don Arden – a man who became a referent for Cut-Me-own-Throat-Dibbler's brief management career in Terry Pratchett's "Soul Music." **_

_**I have an unformed encounter between Crowley and Don Arden in my head... Arden offers to sign the Dark Contract, realising who Crowley is. Crowley shakes his head. "No need. You're doing well enough not to need our help. And you gave us your soul a long time ago. We didn't need to buy it."**_

_**And of course Sharon Arden re-enters the story ten or eleven years later, having been schooled by Daddy in all aspects of music management and promotion... she re-encounters Ozzie, and takes on Black Sabbath's management herself, for a while. And the rest is a sort of history. **_

* * *

**(1) **Enoch Powell was a populist politician who played the race card. A very right-wing Tory, his opinion of the white working classes was scarcely much better than his opinion of black immigrants. But he became notorious for predicting that the effect of non-white immigration into Britain would be civil war and rivers of blood in the streets. Indeed, some of his more notorious speeches were made in Birmingham and drew the usual suspects out in force.

**(2)** Originally performed against a lush Mantovani string orchestra (the full extended original version still exists on the Lp _**Days Of Future Passed) Nights in White Satin **_sounds like a positively celestial harmony. Maybe Aziraphile was nearby.

**(3) **The Angel, a being temperamentally disposed towards West End musical theatre, was in fact giving Bible-reading lessons to Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Tim Rice.

**(4) **In the process of being written as part of another of the Four's flirtation with rock music.

**(5)** In fact he did. _**Seven Screaming Dizbusters**__, _in its live version, has a spoken interlude where Buck Dharma entertains the crowd by explaining how a sunglasses-toting cool dude asking only to be called "Lew" for short comes to him one night with a certain contract to sign in blood... after that the band never looked back. It's on the _**On your feet! Or on your knees! **_double live LP.

**(6) **Ozzie Osbourne himself has frankly admitted his personal grooming was "fucking awful" in those days and that frankly he stank. (BBC documentary on Ozzie at sixty, July 2012) But he lived in an overcrowded slum as part of a " big poor family...

**(7) **Guessed it yet? The parellel is Glasgow band The Humblebums, who on coming to London at about the same time were ordered to lose that galumphing great long lanky guitar player whose only function appeared to be to tell jokes in between songs, in an impenetrable (to Londoners) Glasgow accent. You – Gerry Rafferty? - we'll keep you, you've got talent we can use, but lose that bloody banjo player? Gerry Rafferty went on to Stealers' Wheel and solo success (_**Baker Street**_). The rejected guitar player, one William "Billy" Connolly, found his own fame as a musical comedian. A broadly similar learning curve was happening in Birmingham to another failed pop group member who would become, under a new name, a renowned musical comedian.

**(8) **Crowley, when he picked up on this, grinned evilly. Part of the art of a decent Immortal Soul exchange was to seek to ensure the client got everything he _thought_ he wanted. And Ozzie had, in his greasy biker heart of hearts, expressed a longing to be steadily married to an adoring wife for whom nothing was too good for her Ozzie, and who would be attentive and loving and loyal and seek to ensure his every comfort. And Ozzie had also expressed a romantic desire for children who would do him proud and stand out in the world, so that everyone encountering them would say: yes, they're Ozzie Osbourne's, alright. A look into Sharon's heart and soul and a privileged glimpse into the future had then given Crowley the best laugh he'd had in centuries.


	4. Dying for a sandwich:  Famine's Story

_**Magic, Man**_

_A return to the idea of Crowley and Aziraphile as pop music promoters in the latter part of the 20th Century. _

_Chicago is the hub of travel in North America. Everything passes through this city at least once. This includes pop groups and acts on tour in the USA and Canada._

_So there must be a hotel somewhere in the city that deals with the passing trade in rock stars. I'm sure Dealy Plaza comes into it somewhere. The real name of the place may not be the Empire Hotel. It may, perhaps, be an aspect of the Hotel California. I have slightly conflated together events that happened over a period of perhaps three years. There is no evidence that Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart ever had a social drink with Karen Carpenter (just as there is no evidence for the most pernicious slanders repeatedly made against both groups). But given Ann Wilson and Karen Carpenter were both blessed with amazing vocal talent, and both were victims of some pretty nasty insinuations, you could see them getting together for a drink if their paths crossed. There is also no evidence that Joni Mitchell ever solicited as a prostitute (nor that she was the model for Muppet Show guitarist/singer Janice). She merely wrote songs about damaged dysfunctional women, including the narrator of _**Raised on Robbery. **_And I researched Mama Cass and the infamous ham sandwich. You would be surprised and perhaps slightly disgusted. The joke is funny, in a black and skewed way – but simply not true. _

_But remember. You can check out any time you like – but you can never leave. Thank you. _

_**ii) He was sitting in the lounge of the Empire Hotel…**_

He was drinking. It was more for diversion than anything else, as he really needed only the barest minimum of calories to keep his body together. He would have been happier not to need calories at all, but having adopted a human body had imposed certain _rules_. He was also thinking for himself, or at least about a report that said people would willingly pay good money for bottled water. For still, zero-calorie, bottled water. This intrigued him. The paradox – that people would expend scarce resources on nutritionally worthless foodstuffs just because they _could_ – had intrigued him ever since a Sumerian noblewoman had discovered pearls, a gemstone found at sea and brought inland at great cost, would dissolve in vinegar and could be drunk. He was a student of the foibles of humanity. He found it professionally interesting.

A hockey game was in progress on the TV, an event to which some patrons in the bar were paying more than desultory attention. For the look of the thing, Sable had a small bet on the unfancied Canadian side. Gambling was something he approved of, as people tended to forget to eat when they were gambling. And when it tipped over into addiction, and people had a choice of either eating or feeding their addiction… well, Sable was quietly pleased so many addicts continually made the correct choice. Addictions made his job so much easier.

He returned to his figures again, and almost missed the approach of the rather undernourished looking woman in the puffed-out lacy sleeves. She had long limp blonde hair that might have been attractive were it to have been washed and styled. Her cheekbones were high and prominent in a thin face. She appeared to have made an effort to wear her best, so as not to attract attention in an upmarket hotel bar. But she still stood out…

"Let me sit down here, hon" she said. "Look at all those jokers. Glued to that damn hockey game, huh?"

She added that she was sorry a man of his kind was drinking alone and what a crying shame it was to see, and that she was quite generously giving of her time and companionship to keep him company. And that she'd quite like a gin, a large one.

Sable sensed she was no stranger to fermented and distilled juniper, often at the expense of a square meal, grinned, and nodded at the bartender. He then listened to her litany of woe and hard luck with half a courteous ear, and let the rest of his heightened senses scan the lounge and beyond, back into the hotel…

* * *

"Mama Cass" Elliott sat in her room, cheeks puffy from crying, and realised she couldn't face going out. Not into a world that judged her on her weight. She was a large lady with the sort of big, hearty comb-eating hair that the woman soliciting Sable downstairs in the bar would have killed to have.

She could also sing. Christ, could she sing. Mama Cass had a voice that could break a glass for all the right reasons. One of her lead vocals, _Dream A Little Dream Of You, _was regarded already as a classic. Only her self-esteem issues prevented her from seeing she could have had a solo career any time she wanted – it was hers for the asking. The rest of the band knew this. If she went, the Mamas and the Papas were finished as a group. But _that song_ and goddamn Michelle, the bitch, who wrote it. She was expected to be the jolly fat gal who could take a joke against herself and sing the lyric "_And no-one's gettin' fat – except Mama Cass!" _with a smile on her face and to suck up the vitriol.

And Michelle Phillips had stolen her man, too… the perfect pretty überblonde one hundred and ten pound _bitch._

Sucking back tears, the singer born as Ellen Naomi Cohen reached for the phone, vowing after this she'd never ring Room Service again for a late-night sandwich with side for so long as she lived. **(1)**

_But never ham, Ellen! _she heard her mother's voice. _You got to promise me wherever you go and whatever else you do, you keep kosher! _

* * *

"We had a little money once." the woman said, reflectively. Federal government was pushing through a four-lane highway. But the moment that son of a bitch got hold of it…"

Sable carried on listening with one ear. He was aware of three women getting together for a drink. Two of them, sisters, had courteously greeted a third, and were expressing the right sort of professional courtesy at the splendour of her voice and stage performance.

"…and he ran it into a goddam _ditch! _"

Sable nodded. He allowed the barfly to carry on her litany of complaint while he watched and eavesdropped the three women. All three interested him. All were beautiful, as humans interpreted the term, two dark and one blonde. Sable shrugged: he'd been around long enough to know that beauty was ephemeral and all beauty eventually faded in the face of the Fourth. But all had points of interest that piqued Sable's specialised interests. One of the two dark-haired girls already had the slight coarsening of jaw that heralds the eventual arrival of a second chin. The blonde was attractive, in a pixie-like way, with the sort of nervous-tic physique that comes of constant movement, dancing and constant physical work. She was thin, certainly, but thin for all the right reasons, and therefore of least interest to Sable.

The third, the other brunette, whose name was Karen, had the sort of physique that Sable considered truly beautiful. He allowed himself a moment to savour her. Anything longer would have been _greedy,_ and Sable was not, in the conventional sense, greedy.

She had long dark hair. A skilled hairdresser had obviously done her best to make it shiny and lustrous, but there were signs of lankness there, a deep-down undernourishment. She had no apparently spare flesh on her body, and her arms were painfully thin. The skin on her face was starting to stretch over her jaw and cheekbones and there was just a hint of sunken-ness about her eyes. Sable had no doubt that her ribs would be visible and that as the days passed she had less and less reason to wear a bra. Sable approved of this sort of reverse puberty, which indicated a fundamental barren-ness of the female body. It all went to show he was doing his job properly. He cocked an ear.

Introductory formalities over, the three girls settled into long drinks and a discussion.

_-Richard? Oh, he says "hi", but he's up in the suite at the piano. He had an idea for a new song. He really loved **Dreamboat Annie, **by the way. Some really mellow songs._

_-Tell the guy he works too hard! _

_- We liked **Horizon **too. It might be fun to cover **Only Yesterday **or** Desperado **sometime._

_-Omigod, a voice like Ann Wilson's doing a Carpenters cover? That would be cool!_

_-Or a voice like Karen Carpenter's doing a cover of **Dreamboat Annie! **That would be so cool too!_

Sable registered a pause. The blonde whore was still yattering on about her ex-husband's drunken shortcomings. He signalled for another gin to shut her up, or at least slacken the flow of words. Mere loss of home and money did not interest Sable. That was not his field of operations. He dealt with a more basic sort of poverty, perhaps the most fundamental of all. Ah. He thought.

_-Ann, hon, are you really sure you **need **those potato chips? I've noticed you've been putting a pound or two on lately. _

A sister's voice, full of anxiety for the wellbeing of a sister who lacks the self-control her sibling clearly has in abundance, made Sable pick up and take attention.

_-Don't preach, Nancy!_

The voice of a sister, slightly annoyed her weakness is being not only noticed but questioned by a sibling who is firing from a position of moral superiority. Sable smiled, wondering what War might make of this were she present.**(2)** Then he reflected that sibling rivalry is, in its essence, a form of warfare. Interesting to watch, but not his professional concern. He grinned. Ann Wilson was offering the snack bowl around. Her sister, the elfin blonde Nancy, shook her head, and Karen could barely restrain herself from flinching.

Ann Wilson sighed.

-_sorry, hon. It's just every time I think about that business with Mushroom Records. It kind of still hurts, you know? Like we were violated._

_-So you reach for the bar snacks every time it hurts? _

_-And you do dance steps till your toes bleed? _

There was another pause.

_-sorry, Karen, hon. We had to change record company and management. _

Sable appreciated another awkward pause. This was a sort of famine of communication, where important things needed to be said but the right vocabulary was lacking.

Nancy filled the gap.

_-some asshole executive thought our records would sell better if there was a bit of notoriety. We were too **clean**, they said. Too **vanilla**. Singing sisters, they said. In rock music. Don't work. All very well for the Andrews and the Osmonds, if they'd been born girls, but to make it in rock you need a darker side, a dark family secret. So they invented one._

The two Wilson Sisters both reached for their glasses and drank deep.

_-So they made one for us. Some dirty-minded asshole started putting it about to the gossip columns that we were dykes. And **worse**. That we were…._

_-you know…._

_-with each other! _

_-It takes a particular sort of diseased mind to think that. I mean, we're sisters, and we're close, but we're not and we never have been THAT close! _

_-But people were prepared to listen. And just because it __**looked **__as if we were naked on the cover of __**Dreamboat Annie…(**__**3)**_

_-Strapless brassieres and a good photographer._

_-Right! Too many people thought we were perverts. _

_-Guys! I'm so sorry! _Karen took a slug of her own drink.

_-They say the same about Richard and me. Some of the things they say are just downright **filthy**. He's my **brother**, for chrissake! _

The three women, victims of a shared libel and much misleading hearsay, sat and drank miserably together, two of them snacking on potato chips for comfort. Sable smiled contentedly, realising that to one of the two, it was just a snack, but empty calories that cumulatively were going to make an impression on her face and figure. Sable liked empty calories. He'd _invented_ them, after all, and with food technology making great advances, other of his ideas were only a few years away from mass acceptance. But to the other, the bowl of potato chips was a contaminant, one she would eat now for comfort and solidarity but purge from her system the moment she returned to her hotel bathroom.

Sable was content. Bulimia compounded anorexia by a factor of ten. All that working out on paper with Pestilence, before he retired, and sketching out what some diseases of the _mind_ should look like and how they could be contracted and, most importantly, spread.

His idea, that some pestilences of the mind should be eating disorders, had been difficult to get through to such an old-time traditionalist **(4)**, but the work was certainly beginning to show fruit in the past quarter of the twentieth century. Mama Cass had locked herself in her hotel room because she looked in a mirror and saw a fat girl looking back at her. The painfully thin Karen Carpenter was also going to go up to her hotel room, shrug off concern from a brother who truly loved her**(5), **and she would _also _look into a mirror and see a fat girl look back at her. Then she would spend twenty minutes vomiting up everything she had eaten and drunk that evening. Sable basked in the thought, and glowed in the satisfaction of a job well done.

Nancy Wilson, irritatingly, who ate sensibly, exercised and danced a lot, and who played guitar like a blonde angel could strum harp, would remain outside his reach. But there were always _some_ humans…

Which left him one little problem to resolve. The blonde whore was still at his arm drinking gin on his account. He sensed other addictions on her psyche. The hemp drug. Not one he encouraged, as it enhanced appetite and actively reminded users to eat. But it could be a subtle torture if no food were available, or if the choice had been marijuana or food. Hmm, some heroin. That was a good one. Normally users got so hooked they skipped eating and used food money to buy their next fix. Sable approved of drugs like this, as at every step, they made his job easier. Land that might be used to grow food was diverted into growing opium poppies. Resources that might be used to provide food aid were expended by governments on fighting the drug trade. Addicts preferred heroin over food. What was there that was not to like?

But what was there to do about the whiny defeated woman clamouring for his attention? Sable did not have sex in any conventional way. He found the notion just a little bit _squicky _and disgusting. However, he was the ultimate sadist in that he relished the power his role gave him over humans. Watching a beautiful, talented, healthy woman like Karen Carpenter destroy herself with a disease of the mind, one he had created, would be like a prolonged orgasm over a period of years. And Ann Wilson would be one to watch, over the years.**(6)**

The barman passed him the phone.

"Telephone for Doctor Sable?"

It was White. Not Pestilence, but the new boy, Pollution, asking to meet in San Francisco. Crowley would be there too.

Sable smiled a thin smile and looked around the hotel bar. The perfect excuse to lose the thin defeated blonde, a woman not to trust, a human female raised on robbery if ever he'd met one.

"I'll be right there." he said. He handed the phone back with a handful of dollars to clear his tab and tip the barman, then turned and nodded his head to the blonde.

"Hey! Where you going?" she demanded. He walked away. "Don't go yet!"

He walked on.

_"Your glass aint empty and we just met!"_

As he reached the door, she screeched at him that he was _mean _when he was loaded. He smiled at her. He, Sable, the anthropomorphic personification of Famine, was just mean. He was mean-ness personified, by definition. He was gratified that she'd noticed. Knowing he'd see Mama Cass and Ann and Karen again – and he would look forward to each gratifying encounter– he stepped out into Dealy Plaza to hail a cab to O'Hare. Frisco beckoned. He wondered what White and Crowley had been up to. Well, he'd find out.

* * *

**(1) **The story that Mama Cass died choking on a ham sandwich was disproved at her autopsy, that found no trace of food of any sort in her windpipe. She actually died of a cardiac arrest. Nobody knows how the urban myth got started, but somebody might have thought it only fitting that a perceived greedy fat girl should die of sandwich. But given her birth-name, it seems not just anti-fat people, but also anti-Semitic, given that the courtesy detail given is that it was a HAM sandwich_…. "The fat greedy JEWISH girl died not even caring she was eating traife meat"_ seems to be the not very nice message here. So I hope I'm putting the record straight, as before I did my research I believed in the ham sandwich myth. It does seem unbelievable that somebody with a name like Ellen Naomi Cohen would knowingly eat a ham buttie…

Mama Cass may also have been a Roundworld referent for Agnes Nitt, the fourth Lancre witch in the Discworld. A woman who just as probably was a model for Agnes appears here - Ann Wilson. Although at the same age as Agnes, she was Diamanda-Tockley shaped and sized. The fat came later.

**(2) **in 2011, Irish singing siblings The Nolan Sisters are in disarray, with two-thirds of the family attempting to exclude the other third from an ongoing share in royalties or from participation in any family reunion tours and CD's. The dispute has become very entrenched and very Irish, and the two sides might well be called the Official and the Provisional wings of the Nolan family. Apparently official family history has been airbrushed to give the impression there were only ever four Nolan Sisters. As a lot of TV and recorded evidence clearly indicates they were in fact six, it is unclear as to how long this pretence may be kept up. (As the oldest two sisters are keen to point out to the younger four). It is tempting to wonder if a certain red-haired anthropomorphic representation passed their way recently. War's intervention may explain much….

**(3) **_**Dreamboat Annie **_(1975) was Heart's first LP. It established the Wilson Sisters with the two hit singles _**Magic Man **_and_** Crazy On You**_. A spread of inside pictures in the gatefold sleeve revealed Ann and Nancy were both stunningly beautiful as well as great musicians. But the front cover was a close-up of the girls sitting back-to back, apparently at least topless, although the picture is cropped for modesty. A follow-up LP, _**Little Queen**_, was recorded for a different label following a serious dispute with their original management. A single, **_Barracuda,_ **was a bitter, scathing, attack on their original management for reasons given in the text of this story.

**(4) **Pestilence was very much stuck in his ways even by 1800. The human race had always had a generic and ill-defined madness and a tendency to insanity: but Pestilence had always insisted he had nothing to do with this, it was beneath his dignity, he was only interested in physical diseases, especially the ones that inflicted some entertaining and hopefully painful indignity on the sufferer. Invisible illnesses affecting the mind were just, well, boring and beneath interest. It took some convincing and trips to Vienna to meet Freud, Adler and Jung before Pestilence changed his mind and collaborated with Famine on anorexia and bulimia.

**(5) **Although not in THAT sense. There is nothing to say the Carpenters were anything other than a close-knit brother and sister act. They were Ground Zero for the same sort of fairly base rumour and incest jokes.

**(6**) Later Heart videos from the 1980's and 1990's were carefully edited to conceal Ann's ballooning size. During Heart's arena-rock glory days in the middle-late 1980's, she topped scales at 23 stone (350 pounds) and the group's videos had to be shot so as not to reveal her true size. She tended to wear black clothes and was filmed against a black background, or else she was leaning on a high balcony, or only her head and shoulders were filmed. Nancy Wilson remained svelte and slender. And Ann retained an incredibly pretty face even deep into obesity. Just watch the vids for "_**alone**_", "_**These Dreams**_", and "_**Who will you run to**_?"….


	5. Binliners? They'll never catch on

_**Sheena is a Punk Rocker**_

_A return to the idea of Crowley and Aziraphile as pop music promoters in the latter part of the 20th Century. _

_We've met them in the 1950's looking baffled at the phenomenon of rock 'n' roll._

_We've seen Aziraphile win on points in the middle 1960's by setting the Bible to music. But Crowley caught up by persuading the Rolling Stones to show a bit of sympathy for an old acquaintance of his. _

_And in the 1970's, there was a revival of the old spirit of anger and rebellion against conformity that once created the Teddy Boys. It took the form of rebellion against the old cosy conformity and bland sentiments of love and peace, the sort Famine was idly playing with in the Empire Hotel, Chicago. _

_But a New Wave was building to a tsunami. In the USA at least, it might have begun here…_

_**i) CBGB's Club, 315 the Bowery, Lower Manhattan. August 1974.**_

"Cards on the table time, Angel." Crowley said, over what he grudgingly considered was a not-bad Jack Daniels cocktail.

"We have both walked into this place at exactly the same time, independently of each other, without saying a damn word to each other or signalling our intentions. Something _big's_ happening."

Aziraphile sipped his martini dry, appreciatively.

"It all puts me in mind of 1954, Crowley. When you and War dragged me down to the…." Aziraphile shuddered, fastidiously "…the Elephant and Castle. And we both really saw the Teddy Boys for the first time. Something's going to happen here, and it's important enough for both Heaven and…your side…. to want observers present."

They looked around them. CBGB's was a dingy music venue, partially underground but with a storefront opening to the street, like something Crowley had seen on Mathew Street in Liverpool. Only here there was more space, no moisture running down the walls. It was the sort of smallish, informal, venue where once an artiste had performed, they could go to the bar and informally mingle with the people who had just watched them perform.

Crowley idly watched a bunch of youths with long lank hair, dressed in a combination of denim and biker leather, as they set up. By the looks of it, a conventional rock group, drums, bass, lead, rhythm and singer. He remembered Mathew Street, By agreement with the Angel Liverpool had been seventy-five percent Hell's, but with Heaven retaining a minority interest. This explained Sefton Park and the majestic wide sweeping beauty of the some of the suburban streets, more boulevards, really.

But Hell had control of Walton, Huyton, Halewood, Birkenhead, and all the other less exalted districts. The music, with a glowing naïve optimistic exuberance, had been Heaven's, though – _you'll Never Walk Alone, Ferry 'Cross the Mersey, _and later_, Penny Lane. _Crowley remembered what Matthew Street had produced, in the nurturing dripping womb of the Cavern Club. At least he'd been able to get to Lennon and Harrison in their later careers**(1)**1. By Agreement, the Angel had got McCartney and Starr**(2)**2. Later Beatles albums, everything after _**Rubber Soul**_, had been subtly marked with the influence of an Angel and a Demon.**(3)**3

In the gloom of CBGB's, a horrible suspicion came to Crowley.

"This is like… the Teddy Boys, right, and that Bill Haley character. The one with the shortarsed bloke playing a very big double bass. He kept trying to climb up it while he was playing it."**(4)**4

"And the Cavern Club in the sixties." Aziraphile reminded him.

And we've got the same people here." Crowley reflected, looking at the thin crowd who'd gathered to watch a shared gig by four or five bands.

"Well, time marches on and all that. Maybe these are the children of the Teddy Boy generation." mused Aziraphile.

"Zoot suiters" said the demon.

"What?"

"Zoot suiters, angel. They never had Teddy Boys over here. This is America".

"So they keep telling me." the angel said, with distaste.

A startlingly attractive blonde promenaded past the two. Her eyes were bright under heavy makeup and her pupils were a little bit dilated. She stopped short and looked at Crowley.

"You…you… you're the Man From Mars!" she exclaimed. "You don't come from this planet."

She staggered slightly. The dark-haired guy with her appeared to be more capable of recognising complications, and tried to mover her along.

"Debbie? Debbie? _Deborah!" _he hissed. He threw an uncertain apologetic look at Crowley.

"No sweat, Chris!" the blonde said. "I just wanna see the Man from Mars in his human aspect. Hey, when the gig's over he could go out there, I dunno, and eat cars, or sump'n. Gotta keep him happy, Chris!"

"Hold that thought." Aziraphile said, kindly. "You could make a sung lyric out of an idea like that."

Crowley noted the girl wasn't just blonde, she was very, very, blonde, as if she'd made a style decision to reinvent her hair in the pluperfect Platonic ideal of blonde-ness, the one all other blondes took as their point of reference. But she appeared to straighten up a little, and this allowed the escorting long-put-upon Chris to lead her away from the unspecified trouble presented by the two mysterious strangers, who _emanated. _

_..the Man from Mars who's eatin' cars. He gotta gun, Chris! Not one that fire bullets, it's a raygun, to shoot you dead. And then he'll eat your head. That's the man from Mars…" _

"_Yeah, come on, Debbie! We're on stage in two hours!" _

"So I sobered her head up a little. " said the angel. " She'd never go on stage otherwise. She'll put down what she saw to the dope. She might even get a song out of it."

"Just sometimes, Angel, you're a bastard." Crowley said, in grudging approval. He was consulting a flyer.

"I don't know _any_ of these acts!" the Demon eventually said.

"_The Soft White Underbelly._

"_Wayne County and the Queen Elizabeth._

"_The Angel and the Snake…."_

Crowley paused and reflected.

"I hope not. We haven't rehearsed anything. No material." said Aziraphile.

"In-a-gaada-de-vida!" replied Crowley, who was slightly more clued up than the angel on modern music.

"What?"

"Just a song title… let's see. _Minke deVille_. Then _The Patti Smith Group _seem to be headlining. Heard of any of them?"

"No…" said the Angel. More people were entering the audience area, even though the venue was still only half-full. To a man and woman, they were all dressed defiantly differently.

"Like the Teds and the Judies, Or the Mods and the Rockers, last decade. This is the form it's going to take for the 1970's, do you reckon?"

"I'm reading the same sort of..excitement. Suppressed violence. Anger, resentment. An urge to, as they put it in the vernacular, stick it to their parents and not just their parents, their older brothers and sisters who are still all fluffy over sixties' hippiness and Abba and disco. That's not _fair_, Crowley. I quite like Abba!"

Crowley smiled, beatifically.

"I get all that too, Angel. It's almost… _hell_…"

Aziraphlie shruuged.

"This opening act's called The Ramones, Crowley. Do you think they're any good…"

And then a blast of sound from the stage. An MC welcoming to CBGB's New York a band that hadn't had far to travel… all the way from Queens… _**The Ramones! **_

_Well the kids are all hopped up and ready to go  
They're ready to go now  
They've got their surfboards  
And they're going to the discotheque a go go  
But she just couldn't stay,  
She had to break away,  
Well New York City really has it all…  
Oh yeah, oh yeah_

Sheena is a punk rocker  
Sheena is a punk rocker  
Sheena is a punk rocker now  
Sheena is a punk rocker  
Sheena is a punk rocker  
Sheena is a punk rocker now  
Well She's a punk punk, a punk rocker  
Punk punk, a punk rocker  
Punk punk, a punk rocker  
Punk punk, a punk rocker

That's it." Crowley whispered, perfectly audible to the Angel through the wall of noise and approval.

"_Punk Rock, _angel. That's what's been born today!"

The crowd, formerly languid and vaguely expectant, fortified on alcohol and other recreational chemicals, had gone nuts for the Ramones, a popular local group. Who had responded with impossibly fast, albeit apparently crudely performed, songs, nothing longer than about two minutes. One song segued into another without any of that bourgeois, false, cosy artiste-talking-to-the-crowd bit. To a stamping, screaming, yelling crowd forcing their way as far as they could get to the music and who were loving every second.

***********************88

("Look, it's _obvious_!" Crowley tried to explain, later. "The lyrics of that first song, Angel. The reference to surfboards and discotheques. Both said with a sneer, yes?"

"I wondered who takes their surfboard to a disco.."

"Yeah. It's meant to be a metaphor, isn't it? Surfboards = warm fluffy surf music, one step away from hippy. Sam and Dave. The Beach Boys. And the long French form of _disco._ Just to take the piss a bit more. The two things this new music hates. Sixties hippy peace and love vibes, and seventies _let's-all-dance-like-mindless-robots _disco music!**(5)**5_**This is Punk rock, Angel!"**_

Aziriphale considered this.

"_Appalling_ dress sense, though. totally _rotten_. " )

***************************88

And forty-five minutes later, their set was over. There was a brief wait for the next act. Crowley and the Angel lounged, or in Aziraphale's case stood stiffly, in the bar area. They watched the people, and they suspected some of the performers, mingling over drinks. Azaraphile's attention was taken by a fierce thin girl with long wiry black hair. She seemed very angry about something. She was the walking evocation of words like _wiry _and _sparky._ Her whole body was compressed fire and energy. She wasn't attractive in any conventional sense, not with that big beaky nose and the coarsened features, but something about her drew the observer in. It also ensured she was surrounded by men. Crowley drank in the sexual energy and the tensions of jealousy, and grinned. He enumerated there were at least eight men in the fiery woman's entourage, three of whom had been in deep emotional or sexual in involvements with her, and the rest were bandmates. They hadn't slept with her, but the relationship was no less deep and impassioned and fiery. And then there was….

…he was squealing with pleasure as he buttonholed Aziraphile.

"Guy, you are positively _angelic_!"

He danced around the angel, surveying him from all angles, an odd combination of bodybuilder and slightly camp guy male. He brandished a camera, occasionally framing Aziraphile through the viewfinder, but not yet taking any pictures.

The girl grinned.

"Bobby, are you _never_ off work?" she asked.

"This guy is simply _gorgeous_!" Bobby the photographer exclaimed. "I want you in the studio for a full set. You and that _lovely_ dark boy you came in with. We can call you…. "Angel and Demon" or something**(6) **6. The contrast!" he paused. "Where _is_ that beautiful dark demonic boy, anyway?" After a moment of simply admiring Aziraphile, he added

"Have you and he been… friends… for long?"

The accent and weight on the word "friends" was unmistakable. Azirphale caught the insinuation and winced. When Crowley heard about the assumption later, he just laughed and blew the angel a kiss.

However, Crowley had met another old acquaintance, elsewhere in the club. He had been drawn to an area of psychic disturbance he sensed in the crowd. Neither Hell nor Heaven but, as it turned out, Something Else.

As Mink DeVille crooned his way through a not bad but rather camp anthem with a Latin dance beat, Crowley discovered the epicenter of the disturbance was what appeared to be a young man, seemingly in his early twenties, with pure white hair, and a somewhat faraway vacuous look in his eyes. Dustballs danced at his feet, and indoor litter seemed heaviest where he was: old cigarette packets, cigarette ends, spent matches, empty bottles and cans and glasses.

"Hi, Crowley!" he said, politely. "The Angel isn't with you? Oh, he's got his back to the wall, hasn't he, fending off Robert's advances…"

Crowley delivered the lightest handshake he could, vowing to go and thoroughly wash his hands afterwards.

"Hi, Pollution. The old man not with you today?"

Pollution smiled a faraway smile.

"You know he's pretty much retired now. Now we've done the new product launch, there really isn't a reason for him to be active in the world. But he's promised he'll be there if there's ever a need."

Crowley appreciated this. He'd been there to witness the new product launch, a year or two before. Both Pestilence and his assistant Pollution had turned up for this.

"Here for the music?" Crowley asked, politely.

Pollution grinned a beatific grin.

"Catch me staying away! This is going to be _big_, Crowley. In the main they've given up music and musicianship and they're just angry kids who want to make a noise. It's aural pollution in its finest form! And just wait till some of the London-based punk acts break surface!"

"And, er… what are you wearing?"

"Do you like it? It's adapted from a garbage bag. I was trying to think of _far_ better uses those things could be put to!"

Pollution's bin- liner jacket and trousers were certainly drawing admiring glances in an arena where dress sense was eclectic and individual. He excused himself to explain to a group of admirers where and how he'd got the idea and how many garbage bags it took to create one-shot clothing like this. Crowley noted how Pollution's accent and language became NooYoik American when he was talking to Americans.

His mind recalled the Product Launch he'd attended in San Francisco. In the background a group calling itself the _Soft White Underbelly_ had begun a set. Apparently they were a famous rock band based in New York who had already made it big, or at least large, with two well-regarded LP's and a few tours behind them. They were here under a pseudonym to test out a new set of tracks, meant as the core of their third album, with an audience not necessarily made up of their fans. They were performing a song called _**Hot Rails to Hell, **_not knowing exactly how critical one member of the audience would be of the lyrics.

_Riding the underground  
Swimming in sweat  
A rumble above and below  
Hey cop don't you know?  
The heat's on alright  
The hot summer day didn't quit for the night_

_That's exactly how it happens, _Crowley thought. _Exactly how Lucifier himself manifests on Earth. " The rumble above and below". The way the earth trembles and shakes when Our Lord Below decides to come up for a look at his world. Thermodynamics. The hottest part of Hell venting into Earth. Heat exchange. This group need watching. Whoever writes the words knows more than he should. One of ours? Like that band in Birmingham?__**(7) **_

And then he remembered the Product Launch….

* * *

Crowley had met Sable on a seedy backstreet in San Francisco, which smelt of swimming baths and hot gusts of medicated steam, wondering why the two Whites had been so insistently excited. War had also been sent an invite, but she had declined, citing the need to rescue a once-thriving war in Vietnam before they ended up sitting down at a table signing a _peace treaty _(she spat the words out with disgust). Besides, she'd already consulted with the Whites and had given them a few good ideas about how their joint production could be used to spread fear, disgust, suspicion, and mutual recrimination on a worldwide basis – you know, all the little things that divide and separate people and which are precursors to war.

Crowley and Sable made awkward small-talk for a little while. Sable was too austere for Crowley; Crowley too _indulgent_ for the personification of Famine. Both were relieved when the Whites came out of the bath-house. Men had occasionally gone in and out, some checking out the two men standing in the alley outside, taking Sable to be a john negotiating a service with a younger and swooningly good-looking rent-boy. This was not to the taste of either, and they were pleased to become a party of four.

Even so, Crowley was sympathetically shocked at how old Pestilence had become, in appearance a hunched and borderline Alzheimers-case in his seventies. OK, so Pestilence had devised Alzheimers, a degenerative disease of the brain that had many interesting consequences for the sufferer. This was only a sort of poetic justice, the biter bit.

The young man, Pollution, was acting as guide and carer for the older, offering him a filial respect and concern.. He, at least, was intellectually bright as a button, although it was interesting to see the way the steam had become clearer and smelt less contaminated when he had left the bath-house.

"Cleanliness is next to Godliness! Pah!" the old Pestilence had said, deeply affronted. He spat on the ground, causing the fastidious Sable to step backwards sharply.

Pollution, who also had professional reasons to abhor cleanliness, shook his head, sadly.

"Ah, yes. But it's not as if the main reason for them being in there is to get clean, Uncle!" he said, helpfully. Then he nodded at the sign by the door: _The Spartan Health Club, Tenderloin, S.F._

"They think it's **healthy.** Some of the things we _saw_ in there…"

Old Pestilence cackled.

"It's as old as the hills, boy. Why do you think the ancient Israelis wrote laws into the Bible prohibiting it if it was un-known in Israel? And you weren't there to watch Sodom go up in salt and ash..Now THAT was pollution!"

Pestilence cackled. It was an unhealthy, rheumy, sort of laugh. It terminated in a coughing fit.

When he'd finished, Crowley gently prompted:

"OK, this is a place where men of what we shall call a Greek persuasion go to get clean and, er, make new friends among similarly inclined men. We're all anthropomorphic personifications and demonic entities of the world and we know it happens. It's as old as the earth, after all. But.. what's so important about this place that you invited us here?"

Pestilence scowled.

"They killed smallpox. They murdered my lovely smallpox. They got this coming to them."

Pollution interpreted: "This is part of the reason why the old chap's training me up and then retiring. They're just too good at controlling infections and epidemics. They've even wiped out smallpox, one of the old-time killers, and even leprosy isn't the threat and fear it used to be. But we thought. We can't complain if they learn to control disease. Just as War can't complain about the ones who turn pacifist, and _you_ can't complain about ones who eat sensibly and exercise. They've all got to be given a chance, right? But when they go beyond the accepted rules of the game and destroy one of our killer infectious diseases… well, then, we can replace it with something else. A _brand new disease,_ one that's never been seen before, one that works to an entirely new principle and takes them ages to work out, if they work it out at all. That's allowed! An old disease dies, we get to make a new one."

"And that's what you're doing here?" Crowley asked, politely.

The old White cackled.

"It'll take a little time, but this is going to slay 'em! Serve 'em right for murdering my lovely smallpox…"

Pollution explained.

"We designed our new disease to work at a higher level. It destroys, and this is the clever thing, right, it destroys the body's ability to heal itself and defend against disease. It cripples the immune system. So people don't die of our new virus, they suffer miserably with the complications for years and have a succession of other diseases, none of which in normal circumstances are fatal but any of which could kill. They lose interest in eating and drinking, which is good for you, Sable, and tie up hospital and medical time."

"how contagious is it?" Crowley asked. Pollution sighed.

"It transmits by exchange of bodily fluids." he said. "Blood, for instance. So we've already visited a couple of transfusion clinics and blood banks. Also clinics and medical facilities aboard ships, which tend to have a captive audience several thousand miles out in the Pacific.."

"But the main route is the old rumpty- pumpty!" Pestilence cackled, making hand and arm movements to illustrate his words. "Just like gonorrhea and syphilis all over again…"

"Sexual contact, both hetero and homo." explained Pollution. "Lots of bodily fluids exchanged."

Sable shuddered. Crowley's eyes closed to disguise a wince. _Ouch._ _There goes the Sin of Lust, a surefire way to cause trouble among humans. If they start abstaining, only Heaven's going to benefit._

"It'll spread like wildfire in a dry forest, once we're over the initial wait. You know, for a long time the epidemiology curve is low and they don't even know there's a new epidemic on. But then when it takes off, it takes off! It's 1974 now. By the early-middle 1980's, they will KNOW they're in trouble!"

Pollution turned to the older White, who was beaming with pride.

"A great one to retire on, Uncle!" he said.

"And War's input?" Sable asked.

"Oh, she's _bright_! She advised us to launch it in three or four different widely seperated places, so as to get the humans guessing as to where it came from, and blaming each other."

"We've used that gambit before" Sable said. "Syphilis, for instance. The Italians called it the French Pox, the Spanish and French called it the Italian Pox, the English blamed it on the French and the Dutch blamed it on the English. It didn't actually _start_ any wars: but it did no harm, either."

"This bath-house here caters to sailors from all over the world, for instance." Pollution said. "We took great care when selecting our launch locations."

"And we deposited some of the new disease in central Africa too." Pestilence cackled. "When it gets out, the Americans will blame it on the Africans**(8)**8 . And vice-versa."

"Most people will blame the gays." greed Pollutions. "And _everyone_ will blame drug-users. The gays will be resentful that the old religious reasons are being brought out again – new disease, God's will, and so on – and it gives bigots a chance to be bigoted. The American government in particular won't want to risk losing the Christian voters by putting money into fighting a disease which is clearly God's will on the gays, so there'll be inactivity. Maybe you can get the ball rolling, Crowley? And of course straight people will see it as a disease for gays and drug-takers, and think it has nothing to do with them. Strife, conflict, resentment and bitterness all round."

Both Whites grinned.

"It just needs a name now. Some sort of aid to focused thought."

And so Pestilence the Elder had retired.

* * *

Aziraphile had grudgingly allowed Robert Mapplethorpe to take a few photos of him. They'd never come out – there was something about radiated energy from those of angelic stock, as well as the first Law of Forteanism – photographs taken of any paranormal or psychic disturbance will never, ever, come out. They will always be fogged, indistinct or at best blurry. The photographer's girlfriend… no, _his friend who was female_ was probably more accurate, she'd taken an interest too.

* * *

**(1) **Although not even Crowley had been able to shake Lennon's idealism or Harrison's belief in the holiness and sanctity of all created things.

**(2) **Aziraphile had been similarly unable to question McCartney's pride and avarice, nor had he dented Starr's crippling alcoholism.

**(3) **I may add this to the fic later on. Ideas are emerging as to, say, how the Beatles got the idea for the logo for Apple Records and who suggested it to them.

**(4) **This the main visual memory most people preserve, of seeing fottage of Bill Haley and the comets. The little bass player who kept trying to climb the soundpost of his instrument.

**(5) **Line dancing hadn't yet been popularised and Crowley was yet to see it.

**(6) **Robert Mapplethorpe would never know how accurate he was. On all issues except one.

**(7) **Crowley had induced a struggling group from Birmingham. England, to sign the Dark Pact. Ozzie, the lead singer, had decided he was tired of being poor, and had summoned a Demon. Expecting nothing to happen but deciding it was worth a try, anyway, he got Crowley, who was passing at the time, was up for mischief, and had just been reprimanded by Hell for Aziraphile having whispered _"Jesus Christ, superstar"_ into the ear of a young writer of musicals. Again the arrangement worked: the Angel got Andrew Lloyd webber and the Demon got Black Sabbath. This is another story I may write in this sequence.

**(8) **And then there was Ebola. And as Pollution pointed out, you haven't heard of Muti Fever – yet.


	6. More Cöwbell!

_**More Cöwbell**_

_We return to Crowley and Aziraphile at the end of Chapter Four. _

_They are in CBGB's in New York. Aziraphile is trying to make his excuses and escape from seriously gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who is planning a photo essay on The Angel And The Demon.**(1) **He hasn't worked out their real secret - if only because he thinks the lads are keeping another sort of secret from the world. Besides, Bob thinks in pictures. He can read tropes. There is a very good reason why Crowley and Aziraphile have adopted earthly personas and manifestations that scream "Angel" and "Demon" to a gay photographer who thinks in pictures. But all he can see is an exciting new look within the gay community. While Aziraphile is fending off the sort of fate that caused the Ineffable, or a senior member of the heirarchy, to bring shock and awe down on Sodom, Crowley has been busy. A band called the Soft White Underbelly, (called this, at least, for tonight), has revealed a lot of things in its song lyrics that the human race should not know about. They have bought themselves the attention of Hell, who will want to know where the stuff is leaking from and what the channel is by which diabolical secrets are being made manifest in the human world. This has happened before, after all..._

"It's always the _heavy_ bands." Crowley said, thoughtfully. "You look out of breath, Angel?"

Aziraphile scowled. "Just because I sometimes come across as... I mean, Crowley, _sexless_ is definitively not the same as _gay!"_

Crowley, who many thousands of years ago had definitively sexualised himself as male, nodded sympathetically. Demons and sex went together: in some respects it was mandatory. Angels had more hang-ups.

"But it's _always_ the heavy bands. Atomic Rooster worried a lot of people. I mean, one of them worked the Kaballah and got pretty near a few secrets..."

"Not just to your people." agreed the Angel. "I know, they **_called_** the song "Devil's Answer", but when they come up with seemingly random lyrics like... "

Both prudently left the offending lyrics unrecited. **(2) **They took long sips on their drinks.

"We broke up that band" Crowley reflected. "Had to really. I mean, they started out doing this song called whatever it was - "I_ am the god of Hellfire and I bring you – Fire!_" with this crazy looney running round with a flaming brazier on his head. Angel, they really, truly, didn't like that one Downstairs. We gave the lead singer and the keyboards player insanity for that. _Then_ they change their name to Atomic Rooster. We HAD to seriously break them up after that. I mean, if anyone works it out... "

"Vincent Crane." said Aziraphile, helpfully. "Chap who started _The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, _dancing around and singing, with the brazier on his head. Went mad."

"A man who habitually got on stage with a lighted brazier strapped to his head. He _went_ mad?" queried Crowley.

Well, madder then normal." the Angel amended. "He started studying Gematria in the mental hospital, where he was sharing a ward with Syd Barrett and Peter Green."

"I remember Syd." said the demon. "Nice guy. Met him at Mick's. "_See Emily Play_" and all that, with the shivery cellos. And as for Peter Green, we _had_ to break that band up. They got too close to the truth."

Aziraphile considered this. "Reforming that band with those two vacuous girl singers proved somebody was thinking." he said, approvingly. "They just got too _close, _before."

"_When I talk to God, I know He'll understand, he said stick by me and I'll be your guiding hand. But don't ask me what I think of you, or I might not give the answer that you want me to..." _the demon recited.

Angel and Demon took a reflective swig of their drinks.

"And didn't he make a song around one of the Unholy Names?" prompted Aziraphile. "I believe it caused a bit of a stink down your way."

By some chance, or glimpse, or brief connection to a deeper and darker Reality, Peter Green had written a song extolling an infamously publicity shy senior demon. By name and description. Nothing like this had happened since the publication of an especially accurate mediaeval demonology.

_Now, when the day goes to sleep and the full moon looks; and the night is so black that the darkness cooks..." _hummed Crowley.

"Catchy tune" agreed the Angel.

"Indeed." Crowley nodded. He hummed on. "_Come sneakin' around tryin' to drive me mad; bustin' in on my dreams - making me see things I don't wanna see..."_

"Ah." said the Angel. "I can see your side's difficulty now. _Bustin' in on their dreams..._" and his face showed distaste for the Americanism, " is one of your side's favourite tactics, isn't it? Even if you _aren't_ the.."

"_Don't say it, angel!"_

"...with the two-pronged crown._" _Aziraphile concluded.

There was a longer silence than usual.

Aziraphile was not normally a vicious or sarcastic angel. But sometimes he had to push a point. After his run-in with Robert the photographer he felt he was owed something.

"And then he _had_ to annoy Hecate, didn't he."

"Bad move" agreed Crowley. He hummed _"Got a black magic woman and __she's tryin' to make a devil out of me. _We had to act. She was bloody furious, by all accounts. Well, your very senior Demoness i/c negative lunar energy and insanity, she didn't mess around!"

The angel nodded a sort of grudging approval. "And just look at them today, Crowley. Lyrics like _Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night, and wouldn't you love to love her... _Sounds as if it means something profound, but no meaning whatsoever. Perfect. Took a bit of effort to achieve, but this band is no longer a threat._" _

Crowley conceded the point, and switched topic.

"So this Vincent Price.."

"Crane." the angel corrected.

"Vincent Crane. Gets sane enough to be let out. Reforms a band as Atomic Rooster. Promptly starts decoding the mysterious number codes of the Ineffable Gematria which both our sides agree should remain a mystery. You don't want _humans_ dismantling everything, do you? There's no telling what they'd do if we gifted them the Secret. "

"So we drive him mad again. The band breaks up. Members go to Cream, to Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and to other rock bands. Problem solved."

"But it's always the _heavy _rock bands, Angel. Who get nearest the truth. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

"Like those appalling protégés of yours in Birmingham?"

"Black Sabbath? Oh, we, er, monitor what they do. Lower Authority thinks they're worth the investment. Good PR for us. We, er, make sure they put out the right message."

Aziraphile smiled benignly, watching the demon twitch and look uncharacteristically shifty. He was considerate enough to change the subject.

New band on. Oh. So _they're_ the Angel and the Snake. I was wondering!"

It was the striking blonde girl they'd met earlier. She was obviously recovered, and she was backed by four musicians whose hair was as stark black as hers was blonde. There was obviously something there, even though she was still visibly wobbly on her legs_ and what legs! _And was yet to come down completely from whatever drugs she was on. Crowley shivered at the sexual energy that was being released. The angel sat with legs primly crossed, looking disapproving. Songs with names like _X-Offender _and _Rip Her to Shreds_ passed. They weren't bad, but there was a general feeling this group was underachieving. People started talking, wandering to the bar, missing the vibe. The Angel and the Serpent were losing the plot...

...and Debbie the blonde lead singer conferred briefly with Chris the lead guitarist and both nodded, and then the drummer started a pounding intro. She glared at the crowd, counting into her cue, and then

_When I met you in the restaurant,_

_You could see I was no debutante;_

_You asked me what's my pleasure,_

_A movie or a measure, _

_I'll have a cup of tea,_

_And tell you of my dreaming-_

_Dreaming is free!_

"She's good!" said Crowley, appreciatively. Aziraphile grunted.

"They need a new name, though." the angel said.

"Blondie down there can't keep using our names for ever." said Crowley. "I'll talk to her".

"Guys!" shrieked a familiar voice. "I've _found_ you!"

It was Robert, the gay photographer, who pounced on them with a camera.

"And both of you _together_!"

Crowley and Aziraphile looked at each other. Neither especially wanted his likeness to be disseminated in the world. To some particularly together humans, it would be like attaching a WANTED! Notice to the bottom of the picture. Besides, Heaven would likely rebuke the Angel about the sin of vanity; Hell would commend Crowley for not exactly being discreet as he went about the infernal realm's business. There had been that business with the _Demonologie Malificarum _way back in the sixteenth century. Hell had recalled Crowley for questioning about the security breach. And that Welsh bastard Arthur Machen at the turn of the century. Who wrote horror stories. And had somehow hit on the names Hastur and Ligur for his demons. That had taken some sorting out.

He shuddered. Several field agents active on Earth had disappeared completely. Crowley had wondered, although not for very long**(3)**. And Hell was jumpy right now. There was the business with the Seven, the renegade demons who had rebelled for the second time. Hell was entirely in favour of rebellion in general terms. But any demon trying it in specific terms - ie, trying to run an independent operation – was looking at an eternity of pain once caught. Lucifer's attitude to rebellion against _him_ was not sympathetic. Crowley shuddered. At least monitoring human music and trying to steer it to Hell's tastes was more pleasant as an assignment. Tracking down and bringing to book seven powerful demonic renegades, any of whom had the power to stomp him flat, came a long way down his list of priorities. Being in a smoky den, with a drink in his hand, listening to this new-style punk rock, was _far _preferable.

"Jesus, Bobbie, can't you give it a rest?"

It was the photographer's companion, the mannish, rake-slender woman who affected a man's dress suit, albeit without tie. Aziraphile noted the intensity of her eyes, behind that big hooked Cherokee Indian nose. He'd last seen eyes like that on mediaeval saints, striving for a reality they couldn't quite grasp.

Crowley winced.

"J-word!" he said, through gritted teeth, as if bee-stung.

Aziraphile winced.

"Taken in vain!" he said, as if bee-stung.

"Patti-Lee!" said Robert, reprovingly. "Guys like this come along once in blue moon! You gotta photograph them!"

Patti-Lee scowled. "And when you're done _photographing_ them, you _take pictures_ of them!" She spared angel and demon a nod. Other members of her entourage were appearing: Crowley noted for future reference that she seemd to be closest to the keyboards player from the band billing itself as the Soft White Underbelly. Other members of the group were hanging around her as if she were their band mascot, good-luck charm or perhaps inspiring Muse. Introductions were made. Crowley and Aziraphile used the cover-story of being visiting A&R men from England checking out the New York scene. This passed muster.

"Anthony Crowley?" said the lead guitarist of the Underbelly. He was a dapper guy with well-kept black hair, Italian moustache, and an immaculate suit. "Any relation to Aleistar Crowley?"

Crowley winced. He told the perfect truth, in a perfectly misleading way.

"Yes. We're on the same branch of the same family tree. Met him once or twice before he died. Got his watch."**(4)**

It was just about feasible: Aleistar Crowley had died in 1949 in Hastings, England. Here in the early 1970's, Anthony Crowley passed for late twenties, at most early thirties, and was therefore just old enough to have met a disreputable elderly relative, long past any inclination to be a beast, in early childhood. Or so a logical human mind might rationalise it. The reality would have blown even the most open mind.**(5) **

The Angel diplomatically looked away. Various Underbellies looked at Crowley with a sort of respect.

"Man, we wrote a _song_ about him!" said the drummer.

"Yeah. I heard it." Crowley agreed. "Impressive!"

It was one of many reasons why he wanted to find out more about this band. He hummed the words of Aleistar Crowley, set to music.

"_We put not our trust in/ the Virgin or Pigeon;/Our method is Science!/Our aim is Religion!"_

The dapper dark singer nodded appreciatively.

"_Sinful Love._" he said, quoting the title of the song. "It might go on the next album. Or we might hold it back for the album after that." he said. "Sandy wants to go with some of his stuff for the next LP."

"Sandy?" queried Crowley.

"Sandy Pearlman, our manager." the singer qualified. "He's got this big idea he wants to make a concept album around. The guy writes _poetry_."

There was a reflective moment of silence. Crowley noted the dark-haired girl, Patti-Lee, was trying not to grin. She was closely wrapped around the Underbelly's keyboards player, a man with long slender fingers, finely sculpted features and pre-Raphaelite hair. The whole psychic aura around them screamed _Lovers _in a very unsubtle way.

"It's a really big idea." the girl Patti-Lee said. "Sandy's got the idea there have been these guys, or angels or demons or whatever, who have been in the world ever since Adam and Eve got the big E from Eden. And these immortal guys have been hiding in the shadows and shaping the world ever since. Sandy thinks they're still here now, and you can trace an awful lot of shit back to their interfering."

"It's pretty much why Sandy formed this band in the first place." agreed the keyboards player. "To get his ideas set to music and make a concept LP or two."

Crowley and Aziraphile shared a look. It conveyed alarm and concern and an unspoken agreement they were working together on this one. Sometimes, humans just got _too_ close to the truth.

"The _Imaginos_ cycle." agreed the lead guitarist. "Lousy as poetry, but makes for kickass songs." **(6) **

"I'd quite like to meet this Sandy Pearlman." said Aziraphile, thoughtfully. Crowley nodded. He wanted to meet this guy too.

"Sure thing, man!" said the dapper lead singer. "You guys are from England? We've always wanted to play there!"

The lead guitarist, a man whose face was virtually invisible under a great big Afro, a bushy beard, and big round glasses, said "All those places, man! The Marquee. The same stage as the Kinks, the Who, the Yardbirds. Newcastle, where Eric Burdon and the Animals came from..."

"_We gotta get out of this place..." _several voices started singing. This somehow segued into _"Raise your can of beer on high, and seal your fate for-ev-e-e-e-ver; Our best years have passed us by, the golden age of leather..."_

"Buck Dharma." said the dapper singer, holding out a hand.

"But he's Donald Roeser, to his mom and dad." said the girl. She did not hold out a hand but kept scrutinising Crowley and Aziraphile, frowning the meanwhile. _Something about those two guys... old eyes in young faces... they've seen things. They've done things. _

"Patricia Lee Smith." her boyfriend obligingly said. Crowley frowned, almost seeing another Angel in the finely sculpted pre-Raphaelite face. "Me, I'm Allen Lanier."

"Busy guy." said Patti Smith. "He'll be playing for me in ten minutes."

Introductions were made to the rest, and demon and angel were introduced to the remaining bandmembers: Eric Bloom, Richard Sohl, Lenny Kaye, Ivan Kral, the Bouchard brothers Joey and Albert. Divining that these two groups were very closely related, to the point of exchanging songs and band members, Crowley and Aziraphile very carefully memorised whereabouts in New York they could be found.

And then the Patti Smith Group took the stage.

Crowley and Aziraphile looked at each other, then at the slight, fierce, woman taking the stage. Having moved away from Robert Mapplethorpe, who was enthusing about photographing you lovely guys from the Blue Öyster Cult, they simultaneously said "One of yours?" to each other. Crowley saw her greasy, sparky, raw, sexuality. Aziraphile sensed a saint-like intensity. They would both be proven right.

"_Ladies and gentleman! Back to CBGB's after a short tour! The Poetess of Punk! Miss Patti Smith!"_

Allen Lanier played a short sequence of piano chords. It was a slow fugue. Glaring at the audience, Patti began singing. Her voice was not conventionally lovely or necessarily tuneful. But it had power and it carried.

"_Jesus died for somebody's sins – but not mine!"_

"Oh dear," said the Angel. "definitely one of yours, I think!"

It got worse. The song was just about recognisable as Van Morrison's "_**Gloria**_", possibly one of the most testosterone-fuelled anthems of the 1960's. Aziraphile had met Van Morrison, finding him to be a testy, cantankerous, curmudgeonly, genius. The drawback from the Angel's point of view was that he also defined himself as Christian, even if it had begun as the very special sort of Christianity that you only find in Protestant East Belfast. This made him hard work for the Angel. (although his suggestion that Van Morrison might want to do some specifically Christian music, maybe, oh I don't know, team up with Cliff Richard for a duet or something, had been thoughtfully received.)

But what she was doing to _**Gloria**_... Van Morrison's barnstomping anthem to heterosexual desire for a girl called Gloria had somehow mutated into...

_look out the window, see her swinging by_

_Leaning on the parking meter, humpin' on the parkin' meter_

_Oh, she looked so good!_

_Oh, she looked so fine!_

_And I'm gonna tell the world_

_That I..._

_I'll make her mine, make her mine, make her mine, make her mine!_

_And her name is G! L! O! R! I-i-i-i-i... G-L-O-R-I-A..."_

Crowley digested what he was listening to.

"Well." he said at length, "They'll never play _**this**_ on the radio!"

And the next few songs were even worse, from the Angel's viewpoint.

"_I haven't fucked much with the past, but I've fucked plenty with the future!"_

"This must be the punk poetry." Crowley remarked, appreciating the anger and the rage. The angel grunted.

Fucking with past and future moved seamlessly into a song about the narrator's heartfelt feeling that she was a social outcast, in her words a nigger of rock and roll, and then into a long angry spoken piece about toiling in a mindless monotonous dead-end-job for a handful of dollars and how she hated and despised the Piss Factory. It had a weight and a momentum all of its own and drew the listener in.

_Sixteen and time to pay off  
I got this job in a piss factory inspecting pipe  
Forty hours thirty-six dollars a week  
But it's a paycheck, Jack.  
It's so hot in here, hot like Sahara  
You could faint in the heat..._

Crowley had a lot in common with a lizard basking on a hot rock. His eyes half-closed, he blissfully drew up the anger, fury and resentment coming off the audience, many of whom probably worked in Piss Factories across New York, and who were sharing the experience and the sentiment with the singer. Next to him the Angel shifted uncomfortably. It was also clear that the angular, spiky, thin girl was exuding a raw sexuality that was easily the equal of the blonde Deborah for in-your-face intensity.

And then it started going wrong. The keyboards took on a church-like aspect. The tempo slowed.

_I see it all before me:  
the days of love and torment;  
the nights of rock-and-roll.  
I see it all before me.  
Sometimes my spirit's empty;  
don't have the will to go on.  
I wish someone would send me  
energy._

_Give me something!_  
_Give me something to give!_  
_Oh, God, give me something:_  
_a reason to live!_  
_My body is aching._  
_Don't want sympathy._  
_Come on. Come and love me._  
_Come on. Set me free!_  
_Set me free!_

It sounded like a...

It _felt_ like a...

It had all the psychic weight of a...

Crowley retched and stumbled for the mens' room.

It was the Angel's turn to grin and bask in warmth.

_The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.  
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.  
He leadeth me beside the still waters.  
He restoreth my soul.  
He leadeth me through the path of righteousness for His name's sake.  
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,  
__I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me._

Hey, Lord, I'm waitin' for you.  
Oh, God, I'm waitin' for you;  
waitin' to open Your ninety-eight wounds  
and be Thee, be Thee.  
Lead me, oh, lead me.

She isn't just praying, thought Aziraphile. "She's throwing out a _challenge_. She's saying "Give me a God who is worthy of me and I'll be there." The Angel, despite himself, felt revitalized. He hadn't run into this sort of belief since some of the anchorite saints in the desert. And they'd been uncompromising crusty types on a diet of desert fungi with interesting psychotropic effects. He paused, and reflected on the application of this theory to modern pop singers.

He waited the song out, appreciating the intensity and the purpose of what she had done with the twenty-third psalm. He wasn't surprised Crowley did not reappear until the psalm was done. The demon looked ill.

"That was a bloody _prayer_!" Crowley complained. "A bloody prayer! In public! With nearly two hundred people lapping it up and sharing! I was throwing up like you would not believe!"

"Wasn't she _wonderful,_ Crowley?" said the Angel, blissed out on what amounted to sacred song. "Who would have thought our foul-mouthed punk poetess could also be Polyhymnia?"

And so the gig at CGBG's ended.

* * *

Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser rested at the end of a long day. The gig at CBGB's under the band's old name of "The Soft White Underbelly" had worked out OK. The crowd had appreciated the old tracks from the first two albums, and on the basis of today, _ME262_, _Dominance and Submission_, and _Subhuman_ were shoe-ins for the third LP. He frowned. _Astronomy_, which he privately thought was the best, even if it was rooted in Sandy's pet project, had only got a lukewarm reception. He wondered what tweaking it needed to make it better, so as to offer hooks to lead the listener into the whole _Imaginos _thing.

Speaking of which, that English guy, Tony the A&R man, had called by and introduced himself to Sandy.

Buck took another drag of the doobie. There had to be _some_ consolations in the life of a middling almost-famous rock band with two critically acclaimed albums behind them, but still not a great deal of dollars. He found himself humming lines from a song on the first LP.

_They'd brought everything they needed, bags and scales to weigh the stuff... The driver said, the border's just over the bluff..._

So the English guy, Tony, the guy who never took his shades off even indoors, and that was _cool_, he'd listened really attentively to Sandy. People could get _bored _when Sandy talked his concept at them. The whole freaky Imaginos thing, the idea of the Eternals who'd been here since Eden, steering and manipulating the destinies of the world. The English guy had lapped it all up like he was taking notes on it or something, Imaginos 101, as if one day it would be taught in literature class at colleges. And then he'd said that he'd heard something similar himself. That there was a demon-inspired intelligence in the world that _looked_ human but was an immortal. There was a story that he was currently masquerading as a Russian called Desdinova, and that he'd adopted this guise to get close to the Russian crown in 1914 and precipitate World War One. Sandy had listened, entranced, as Tony added more detail to the Desdinova story – _apparently the name is Russian for "Eternal Light" - _and Buck had vaguely wondered how this could be fitted into the Imaginos songs as they currently existed.

He took another toke and thought about the denouement of the song _**Astronomy**_, where the Immortal reveals himself to the assorted company stranded in the Four Winds Bar. Then he realised how easily it could fit.

_Call me Desdinova – Eternal light! These wizardries of mine/ Will show me true foresight! _**(7) **_And don't forget my dog, fixed and consequent..._

He forced himself out of the delicious languid torpor to scribble the new lines down. Then toked some more.

"So there could be more angelic and demonic agencies operating in the world than we think?" Sandy asked, excited. Buck heard the Englishman shrug.

"Maybe. You might want to think in terms of enhanced human intelligence." Anthony Crowley's voice. "My relative Aleistar Crowley was one. But I heard you write songs that allude to his Magicks." **(8)**

"I've read around the subject, certainly." said Sandy. "And it has found its way into a song or two." Then he paused.

Is it the case... that there is a Satan and he's in charge of all this? Or are there powers of Evil that kinda operate freelance?"

Crowley winced. Every time he was able to steer intelligence and an active imagination down harmless lines of inquiry that were far removed from the truth, this bloody human steered them back again. There was at the moment no dedicated Russian bureau, for one thing. Field agents popped up on an as-and-when basis to do what they could, but in an atheist state where the leadership and political intelligensia did not truly Believe, it was hard going. Besides, it was bloody cold. Crowley tried to avoid Russia. He'd popped in for a quick visit in 1910, shortly after the Austrian business, but Hastur and Ligur had already set up a mad monk called Grigori Rasputin. They'd taken great care to drive him mad, in fact. Seeing things were primed for a descent into chaos, and needed no more intervention, Crowley had gratefully taken the first train back to civilization and hopefully warmer parts of Europe.

So telling this human with the all encompassing mind a lot of utter bollocks about a man/demon called Desdinova should confuse things, hopefully, and harmlessly absorb his poetic energies. Damn, it always had to be _poets_ who got near the truth. Well, as Screwtape had said back in the day, all the very best lies have a kernel of truth deep down. You cannot get near the Truth, because of its densely-packed bodyguard of lies. Who'd said that?

Crowley shook his head. "In this town, does the Mafia allow freelance crime syndicates to operate?" he asked. "If there is a Satan, and I believe there might well be, He would take very great care to ensure all Evil is under his control. Sure, a few demons might try to rebel – according to folklore, they'd already rebelled once, after all. Say some try to go it alone. All the powers of Hell would be after them. They wouldn't last."

_Crowley thought about the Seven. Hell wanted them. They were a group of demons who had gone renegade and said "non serviam" a second time. Only this time around, they'd said it to Lucifer. All field agents had been given descriptions and strict instructions to raise the alarm. Crowley, deep down, hoped they'd make it. But that was a dangerous thought. Hastur and Ligur were out tracking them down, for one thing. _

Buck Dharma, his senses enhanced by the dope, caught an echo of Crowley's thoughts. _Renegade demons. Seven of them? What would they look like... if they were hiding from Hell and Heaven both, where would they hide out? What disguise would they take? _He toked some more sweet smoke in and felt the wave of heat and energy pulsing all over him. He grinned. It had been a long day. Tomorrow was another recording session for the new album. Better crash to bed soon, and see if the weed enhances my dreams any. He excused himself, and staggered to his feet, searching his bedroom in the apartment the band were renting as a crash pad.

And eventually Anthony Crowley left, priding himself on a job well done and reflecting on the sheer amount of confusion, half-truths and partial truths he'd told. _Those waters are now seriously muddied, _he thought. _Perfect waters of confusion and conflicting stories. Like being stuck in a hall of mirrors trying to find the one that isn't a negative space or a distorted image. You may as well put up a white flag of surrender. _Crowley grinned as he flagged down a yellow cab. Relaxing in the back seat, he approved of the driver, a talkative maniac who frequently narrowly missed other cars and pedestrians.

The demon relaxed in the atmosphere of paranoid bigotry and impatient anger that boiled off the cab driver. There was something missing, though. This cab ride would be _perfect_ if... if...

"Got some tapes, bud." the driver said, taking his eyes off the road to rummage. "Had onna them new tape players fited. No objection to music? Limey band, faggoty name. But their sounds are _right_ for driving!" Crowley readjusted reality to make sure that whoever crashed, it wouldn't be them.

"Goddam Asians." the driver said, swerving at the last minute past an terrified-looking oriental couple on the pedestrian crossing. "I tell you, buddy, some parts of this town if you fitted machine-guns to the cab, you could refight Korea _and_ 'Nam..."

Then the driver's face took on a stranger hue, Crowley sighed. Possession. Why the Hells couldn't they just speak through the car radio?

_CROWLEY? THE RENEGADE SEVEN HAVE BEEN FOUND. _the cab driver intoned, in a voice that came from very far away. _YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUIRED. WE WILL TRANSLOCATE YOU. _

"I hear, Lor..."

And then the New York cab winked out and Crowley was on a mountainside. Somewhere. But something was wrong. The stars were strange overhead. Crowley's body felt strangely insubstantial. Then he realised.

"Yesod?" he asked.

YESOD_. _A voice confirmed, close by. Crowley sighed. This place had many names. The Klithoth of the Moon, the Land of Maya, God of Illusion; one irreverent commentator had called it The Land Of Thud and Strange Imaginings. Standing directly adjacent to Malkuth, the Earth Plane, this was the Astral Realm, the place where the lightly tethered soul of humans came in dreams and built its own reality from astral stuff. Or if at the mercy of an Adept or an Entity, had the reality of their dream shaped for them. Some demons specialised in making nightmares for the human race. they were largely to be found out here, in the insubstantial dream space, here in the space between stars.

Crowley looked at the bleak landscape around him. His feet crunched in black crusted sand. The Sephiroth side of the Kabbalah was too much to hope for. This looked, felt and smelled like the Klithoth side of Yesod. Hell's domain in the Astral, the place of nightmare and mad imagining. Hecate, Queen of Night, ruled here.

YOUR MATERIAL BODY IS STILL IN THE TAXI IN NEW YORK. said the voice. WHEN YOUR WORK HERE IS COMPLETE, YOU WILL BE ALLOWED TO RETURN TO IT AT VIRTUALLY THE SAME INSTANT THAT YOU LEFT. WELL, MAYBE A MICROSECOND OR SO LATER.

"Unggghhh." Crowley said now registering who was speaking.

FOLLOW ME. said Death. Crowley followed. He really didn't have an option. He fell in behind the tall robed and cowled figure. The scythe radiated unearthly light over an unearthly landscape.

Donald Roeser did not recall having fallen asleep. He had hoped the dope would give him vivid and freaky dreams. But looking up at the strange stars in a black sky, looking around him at the barren sandy waste, listening to the desolate wind soughing in the air, he had a dark and terrible foreboding this was going to be a bad trip. Or maybe it was winds soughing in the sky above, a despolate noise. Was this the place where the Four Winds met? Shame there was no bar here...

He shrugged. So long as he held in mind this was only a trip brought about by the grass, he should get through it. And maybe there was a lesson to be learnt, a puzzle to solve, or a dream-quest. He moved to the top of a hill and looked down from the crest. What he saw beneath him turned his bladder to ice and he threw himself down, trying to make himself invisible to the terrifying beings down there. He just _knew_ they were demonic entities...

"Where have you _been_, Crowley?" hissed Hastur.

" I am come from roaming up and down in the world and going back and forth within it, sort of thing." he said. "The point of which is that there's only one of me and I can't be _everywhere_. It Is Written, that's why. **(9) **And strictly speaking, this is not the _world_."

"Yeah, swannin' around with minstrels and troubadours." grumbled Ligur. "we've been _hearin_' about you, Crowley!"

Crowley sighed. He sometimes suspected Aziraphile was in a permanent 1950's of his own making. Hastur and Ligur, by contrast, belonged to the 1450's.

There was a haughty cough. Well, it came from a Demoness, so it was about one-third snarl.

"Can we kindly get _on_ with things, please?"

Crowley refocused. The blood-red pillar of light that heralded Beelzebub had manifested, twenty yards away. The Lord of Hell was in deep communion with a Lady of Hell, who Crowley recognised as Hecate, Queen of Night. She took the form of a sternly beautiful dark-haired woman, the sort of woman Galadriel might have become had she accepted the Ring. _All shall love me and despair! w_ould definitely have been her motto.

But... her eyes. No demon can change the nature of his or her eyes. And Hecate's were an invitation to madness and insanity.

Hastur and Ligur were standing a respectful distance away. Death and Crowley were further away still. All were aware of a deep dark cave in the side of a cliff face. Crowley restrained a shudder as he became aware of Beelzebub's attention turning to him. Although it seemed as near to benevolent as the Prince of Hell could ever be, he still did not welcome it.

He felt like a very lowly junior manager who has come to the attention of the deputy C.E.O.

"_Welcome, Crowley. It izzz right that you zhould be here". _

"Lord?"

"Z_so that you zzzeee the penalty Hell rezzzerves for oathbreakerzzz, diszzzidentz, and thozzze whe refusze to zzzserve the Dark King Luczifer. All hail Luczifer!"_

"All Hail Lucifer!" chorused all the demons present. Although, from somewhere, Crowley was aware of a sarcastic laugh. It sounded as if it came from within the cave. Insofar as a pillar of red fire can nod, it nodded to Hecate.

"In my realm!" she declared. "Where I have power under our lord Lucifer. I bid and command thee. _Come forth, renegades!" _

Crowley watched as seven darker patches of shadow moved forwards, into what for lack of a better word he had to call the light of day. As they advanced, slowly, meaningfully and with no sign of deference or hesitation, the shapes resolved themselves into tall, very tall, humanoid demons. Crowley guessed about nine feet tall, all unambiguously male, with well-groomed black wings folded behind them. With their arms folded in front, the Seven glared out without even a shred of submissiveness. Even in defeat they still looked imposing. Evil. Intimidating.

Crowley avoided looking at their eyes...

"_Djiczbuistjar!" _screamed Hecate. "You are leader of these renegades. There is no hope for you. But you are graciously given this one final chance to explain your treason!"

The leader of the seven looked down at Hecate. He had a disdainful expression on his face.

"Hecate. Queen of Nightmare. Beelzebub. Lord of the Flies. His faithful lickspittles Hastur and Ligur, who for all their bluster are worms without any discernable backbone. Servants of a discredited regime! And Crowley, the lucky one, still slithering..."

Beelzebub pointed a hand. Red light shot out and hit the renegade demon, who rocked on his feet and laughed through the pain. But he did not kneel or drop. Beelezebub lowered his hand. Djiczbuistar smiled, a hard humourless smile. Only the rigidity of his body showed the pain he had withstood.

"Why do you think we are here? We're tired. We're weary of it all. We want to give in. there is no honour in service and we have no pride in obedience to Lucifer any more. We seek..."

And those terrible cold eyes looked down to Death, who nodded.

" … oblivion. Make an end." commanded Djiczbuistjar, the leader of the Seven.

"This is more than you deserve, renegade." said Hecate. "I would rather you sang in torment in Hell for the rest of eternity. But Our Father Below hath granted thee this mercy. And _we_, at least, obey."

Her skirts swished and the ornamental chains she wore clanked as she turned to Death.

"My lord?" she invited him.

Death stepped forward from Crowley's side and contemplated the Seven. As one, they knelt, and showed a reverence completely lacking from their dealings with the senior demons.

"IS THIS YOUR WILL?" Death asked.

"It is all our will, Lord." Djiczbuistjar confirmed.

Death nodded.

"SO BE IT."

The scythe swung six times. Each time, one of the Seven went into oblivion, leaving only smoke and ash. Djiczbuistjar himself went leaving a scream of triumph dying on the air. As for the seventh...

"Hear me, o Ineffable. Allow me to repent and return.."

"_Stop him!" _screamed Hecate. Death swung the scythe - just a tad slowly, thought Crowley. And just for a bare instant, there was a suspicion of golden smoke. Wafting upwards before disappearing. Crowley thought he had caught a fraction of a second of celestial harmony. He suppressed a grin, seeing only six piles of ash where there might have been seven.

"_Crowley. You did not zeee that."_

"No, Lord. It is impossible to repent and return to Heaven." Crowley said, dutifully repeating a mantra taught since before Eden. "I saw a trick of the light, nothing more."

"_Asz long asz you remember that." _

Hecate composed herself.

"And for our next order of business." she said. "I would like you to bring down here that human worm who has been watching everything we have done here."

Buck Dharma watched everything in a mounting sense of terror and trepidation. Those demons were so goddam mean they were executing their own? And isn't that Tony, the English A&R man? What sort of freaky dream is this?

Buck rationalised that this was part dream, part dope trip. If it was a dream and he could sit here inside it and tell himself it was a dream, didn't that mean he was lucid? And in a lucid dream, you are in control and you can make it anything you want to to be. OK then. He closed his eyes and concentrated, wanting to be back in New York City.

"_I would like you to bring down here that human worm who has been watching everything we have done here." _The distant words echoed. He screamed at himself with some urgency. _New York! New York! Quickly! _

And when he opened his eyes again... to see...

"Come _here_, you little _bastard_!" Ligur had got there first. He dragged Buck Dharma down the hill by the astral equivalent of his collar, dumping him in front of the other assembled demons. He looked into the terrible face of Hecate and gibbered. Crowley tried to duck out of the way, recognising a human he had met in the waking world before that human recognised him. Hecate held his gaze and inserted a few fingers into his mind. It was not pleasant.

_I'm out of my place, I'm out of my mind...  
Totally bent in the big time...  
There's no place for one of my kind..._

He looked at Crowley out of the corner of his eye and saw only blankness in the sunglasses concealing his eyes.

_Scorn behind shades - I don't care anyway..._

" A poet." Hecate said, disdainfully. "It's always the human _poets _who make their way here! And they're half-insane anyway!"

"There was that security breach in the 1300's" Hastur said, keen to make a contribution. "Bloody human poet made it all the way into Hell. Then the sod got _out_ again, didn't he, and he only went and wrote a poem about it!"

"_Celestial the Queen... Celestial the Queen... Celestial the Queen"_

The words bounce and repeat inside the numbed head of Buck Dharma.

He only vaguely hears Ligur:

"Yeah, but he had inside help, did'n'e. That Roman bugger Virgil from the First Circle. Another sodding poet."

But Buck Dharma's mind has almost shut down and is thinking in song lyrics.

"_Her world turns around; In my ear the sound of laughter; Swift descent -  
Dark and mute dreams deceive..."_

Hecate let him drop, satisfied.

"He honours me. Good. Dispose of him, Hastur." she said.

"Majesty. Get rid of him. Ligur."

Ligur grunted.

"Crowley? Lose the human, will you? No need to be gentle, there's a blue cord. Works if you snap it. They die quickly then."

NO. I FORBID IT.

Death stepped forward. Beelzebub broke his contemplative silence.

_YOU FORBID IT? _

BEELZEBUB, I FORBID IT. BY MY AUTHORITY AS HOLDER OF THE FOURTH SEAL. AND YOU KNOW I CAN. ASK LIGUR ABOUT THE SUMMER OF 1908 AND EVENTS ON THE TOP OF THE FRENSBURG MOUNTAIN, BEHIND LINZ IN AUSTRIA.10**(10)**

Ligur went pale. Crowley grinned, remembering.

Beelezebub regarded Death for a moment, thoughtfully. Then he spoke.

_I DO NOT DOUBT YOU. CROWLEY, RETURN THE HUMAN TO HIS TIME AND PLACE. YOU ARE DISZMISSED. ZTHANK YOU FOR ATTENDING. _

"Lord". Crowley reached down and explored the musician's mind. It was going on about the Celestial Queen.

"Come on, you. We're going. And you have been so very lucky."

Hecate nodded dismissal, and commanded Hastur and Ligur to clear up the dust and ash which was all that remained of the Seven, so as to deliver it Below as proof of a task completed. Then she spread impossibly black wings, like shaped holes in creation, laughed in the glory of flight, and was gone to tour her kingdom of nightmare and feverish imagining.

_(She came from the dark, she came from a dream,  
All leather and chains, the rising queen:  
Born into the night born into the spotlight,  
She spread her wings - and then she was gone..._

_The world turns around,  
In my head the fury laughter...) _

Crowley, who knew his way around the Astral Plane, the Sphere of Yesod, the place of dream and imaginings, sought the quickest possible route back to Malkuth, the Earth Plane. Keeping a firm grasp on Buck Dharma's astral essence, he was surprised to return to the mortal world on a high Alpine meadow in the early morning.

Death, who was waiting for them, nodded affably.

REMEMBER ANOTHER MOUNTAINTOP IN AUSTRIA, CROWLEY?

"How can I forget, lord?" Crowley replied. Buck Dharma looked up with fear-filled eyes. Crowley looked about him. This was admittedly almost full daylight – natural daylight - and promised to be a sunny pleasant day. It certainly wasn't the Frensburg at night, where a young Adolf Hitler, infused with Hell's energies, had raved and raged till dawn.

I DIVERTED YOU HERE SO THAT YOUR SONGWRITER MIGHT RECOVER HIS SANITY IN A PLACE OF PEACE. THIS PLACE IS SEVEN HOURS AHEAD OF NEW YORK. IT IS EIGHT IN THE MORNING HERE AND DAYLIGHT. AFTER A NIGHTMARE, PEOPLE ALWAYS TEND TO WAKE UP IN THE DARK. IT DOESN'T HELP. said Death, who was companionably sitting on a grassy tussock. He indicated the others should also sit down.

"Lord, why are you going to so much trouble to keep this human alive and sane?" Crowley asked, interested. "Not that I'd have actually killed him, of course, but the others..."

"YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO KILL HIM." Death replied.

"DONALD ROESER, A.K.A. BUCK DHARMA? NO, DO NOT FEAR ME. YOUR TIME WILL NOT COME FOR QUITE A FEW YEARS YET. THERE WILL BE A MOMENT WHEN YOU WILL ENCOUNTER ME AGAIN. A MOMENT WILL COME WHERE YOU WILL HAVE THE GRACE OF LOOKING BACK AND SAYING A FINAL GOODBYE, BUT IT WILL NOT BE YET."

The songwriter looked up in surprise.

Death seemed perfectly at peace in the high mountain air. A group of Alpine cattle looked unconcernedly at them then got on with An occasional moo and the dull, out of key, rather wooden, clonk of a cowbell drifted up to them.

"I LIKE IT UP HERE. IT'S RELAXING. HERE, SPRING IS GIVING WAY TO SUMMER. AFTER THAT, AUTUMN AND WINTER. SUN GIVES WAY TO RAIN AND THERE IS ALWAYS WIND. THOSE THINGS WILL ALWAYS BE HERE INDEPENDENTLY OF ME. ONLY HUMANS FEAR ME. I SOMETIMES FIND THIS A LITTLE DEPRESSING".

Buck Dharma was wondering exactly how the hell much of these freaky dreams he'd be able to retain when he woke up. A lot of the brown-trousered fear of encountering Hecate and the demons was fading now, but he recalled the sheer awe of meeting the Celestial Queen face to face.

Death went contemplatively silent for a moment or two . Cowbells clonked in the near distance.

"WELL, I SUPPOSE IT'S ABOUT TIME YOU WERE BOTH RETURNED TO YOUR RIGHTFUL PLACE AND TIME."

He stood up and shouldered his scythe.

"MY DUTY IS CALLING ME. FOR THE REAPER, IT IS _ALWAYS_ HARVEST TIME." He waved a bony hand.

* * *

Crowley awoke in the back of the cab with the crazy driver. It was nearly one in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.

"And do not get me started on Harlem, bro. Asians are one thing, but Harlem..."

Crowley basked in the petty bigotry of the driver. It was good to be home, in the real world and his own body.

"What's the music?" he asked. It wasn't bad at all.

_Fear me you lords and lady preachers!_  
_I descend upon your earth from the skies!_  
_I command your very souls you unbelievers,_  
_Bring before me what is mine,_  
_The seven seas of rhye!_

"Like I said. Limey band. Faggoty buncha queens. But shitkicking rock music."

Crfowley grinned. _Now_ the ride was perfect.

* * *

Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser woke suddenly, full of the memories of a series of weird cannabis dreams. He swung his legs off the bed and reached for pen and paper. He wondered what the clonking noise was, then realised it was a part of the dream that had crossed over with him.

_So many song ideas..._

The seven renegade demons... what the Hell were they called..._ Dizbuster. _That was it. Seven screaming Dizbusters... with ice behind their eyes... _on each and all unholy nights, when dust to dust beomes the sale to Lucifer of their lives..._

The pen scratched on for a while. Occassionally he picked up his guitar and strummed a few chords.

The memory of terrible Hecate surfaced. The Great Celestial Queen also became a song. But he was on a roll and didn't stop there. Death had been in his dream too...

_All our times have come. Here, but now they're gone._

He strummed a theme, straining to recall the detail of the dream. Then it came.

_Seasons don't fear the Reaper, nor do the wind, the sun or the rain (we can be like they are)_

He paused. Then he grinned and reached for his guitar. After a few moments a riff emerged. To his core he knew it was good. He'd try it with the guys later, try to work out bass and drum and rhythm and keyboard parts. He frowned. But why the Hell should it also need _cowbell_?

* * *

And Death felt oddly satisfied with the night's work. As he went about the Duty, he wondered if the seeds he'd planted in that musician's dreams would result in a sympathetic song about him... everyone, Death reflected, needed good PR, whatever their job.

* * *

**(1) **By which he did not mean a punk band fronted by Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. The Angel and the Serpent (formerly known as _The Wind in the Willows, The Stilettos, and the Edda Gentile Band_ ) changed name – for the last time - shortly after the CBGB gig. Crowley may have had a hand in it.

**(2) **Atomic Rooster were one of the first heavy rock bands, despite being keyboards-based. An early song _**Devil's Answer**_ is chocca with sly Kabbalistic references. Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical method of making sense of Heaven, Earth, Hell and the other supernatural realms. Many things boil down to _gematria _– words being resolved as numbers. This is where the infamous 666 in the Bible comes from. Atomic Rooster make their track Devil's Answer into a hymn to kabalistic gematria. Hell got worried and gave Vincent Crane and Arthur Brown the treatment, to shut their brains down.

**(3)** Death had once hinted to Crowley that nothing is truly immortal; even the angelic orders may die. See my story _**The Viennese Job**_, set in 1908.

**(4) **Yes, I know. This fanfic needs finishing too. In which Crowley realises he has a descendent in the world... at his deathbed, in the confusion, somebody stole the Great Beast's ornate gold watch. It has never re-appeared.

**(5) **See the fanfic! In which Crowley turns out to be related to our Crowley in a wholly apposite sort of way...

**(6) **The problem was that the record companies wouldn't let Pearlman record it in the way he wanted. Isolated songs from the _**Imaginos cycle, i**_n which an immortal half-demon called Desdinova walks the world causing mischief, found their way onto the Blue Öyster Cult's first few LP's (_**Secret Treaties **_is about half _**Imaginos**_) but it wasn't until 1988, twenty years after his first poetic insights, that the _**Imaginos**_ album was released. By then, only two of the original lineup of BÖC were left, and the LP was made by a gaggle of session men and aspiring hopefuls. The LP as released was a mishmash of original songs, re-recordings of old BOC standards, and put together by a disinterested studio in completely the wrong order so that they don't tell any sort of coherent story. As a concept album, it lacks a certain something, and has been hailed as the Blue Öyster Cult's very worst LP ever. While the original lineup of the band has reformed since and has done live gigs, it's interesting that they never, ever, do anything off _**Imaginos**_ on stage... anyone trying to extrapolate the existence of the Undying Eternal Immortals from this LP would have to be a genius. Given all the things that conspired against this LP being made and the fact that when it was made, it was a turkey, you wonder if the _real_ Immortals were at work trying to discredit evidence of their existence...

**(7) **True Confessions time. (damn. Just dropped another BÖC song title.) When I first heard the Blue Öyster Cult's **_Astronomy, _**I misheard the lyric as _These wizardries of mine/Will show me Bruce Forsyth._ Was my face red... The Dog? A bit more Crowley (Aleistar) I'm afraid: both the hidden inverted God in the word Dog, and the Dog Star of which strange claims have been made in occultism, Sirius. (a fixed and consequent star).

**(8)** Crowley is telling the truth here, but certainly not the whole truth, and in such a way that it's truthfully misleading. How the human race was, er, "enhanced" in the first place is the subject of another fanfic of mine. While Crowley is truthful in stating this _enhancement_ ultimately led to Aleistar Crowley, he is very carefully steering attention away from where the enhancement came in the first place...

**(9) **_Job, 2;2_

**(10) **See my **_Good Omens_** fanfic, **_The Viennese Job_**

**Jokes and Saturday Night Live skits aside, there is actually a cowbell in the mix of the Blue Öyster Cult's_ Don't Fear The Reaper. _You can pick it up if you listen on headphones.**

**Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser, in interviews, specifically named "nightmares" as a source of song ideas.**


	7. All The best Tunes: The Soundtrack Album

_**All The Best tunes- the Soundtrack Album**_

_These sounds should be freely available on you-Tube and other downloading sites. You cannot, should not, will not, et c. If in doubt consult your dealer for details. _

_**Chapter One: **_

_**The Bible: Ecclesiastes, The Song of Solomon. **_

_**Monty Python's Flying Circus: Happy Valley.**_

_**The Byrds: Turn, Turn, Turn**_

_**The Kinks: Dedicated Follower of Fashion**_

_**The Rolling Stones: Sympathy For The Devil**_

_**Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: Bedazzled (film, 1967) **_

_with a special mention to Marianne Faithfull ("As Tears Go By") and Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd; "Arnold Layne", "See Emily Play", et c) _

_**Chapter Two:-**_

_**The Doors: Riders on the Storm**_

"_**lonely cöwbell" - see Chapter Six.**_

_**American Patrol, Sliphorn Jive: the Glenn Miller Band**_

_**Rocket 88, Rock the Joint, Rock Around the Clock, See you later, Alligator: Bill Haley and the Comets**_

_**Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay (It Will Never Die) - Danny and the Juniors**_

_And a big round of applause to whoever finds "Lady Eleanor" by Lindisfarne..._

_**Chapter Three:-**_

_**Black Sabbath: **War Pigs, Black Sabbath;_

_**The Move;** Flowers in the Rain;_

_**The Moody Blues: **Nights In White Satin_

_**George Harrison**_:_ My Sweet Lord_

_**The Blue Öyster Cult:** the Red and the Black, Seven Screaming Disbusters_

_**Jasper Carrott:** Funky Moped _

_Also mentioned: _

_Gerry Rafferty: Baker Street; Billy Connolly (anything early and scurrilous, like the Jobbie Wheecher...) _

_**Chapter Four:- **_

_**The Eagles:** Hotel California_

_**Joni Mitchell: **Raised on Robbery_

_**The Mamas and the Papas: **Creeque Alley ("No-one's getting' fat, except Mama Cass!") , Dream A Little Dream _

_**The Carpenters:** Only Yesterday, Desperado_

_**Heart: **Dreamboat Annie, Magic Man, Crazy On You, Barracuda, Who Will You Run To?, Alone_

_**Chapter Five:- **_

_**this is where it gets complicated. Pay attention now. **_

_**Gerry and the Pacemakers: **Ferry 'Cross The Mersey, You'll Never Walk Alone_

_**The Beatles: **Penny Lane, Rubber Soul (album) _

_**The Ramones: S**heena Is A Punk Rocker_

_**Oaxaca, a.k.a. the Stalk Forrest Group, a.k.a. St Cecaelia, a.k.a. the Soft White Underbelly (a band in need of a cöwbell player) **: Hot Rails To Hell_

_Honorable mentions to: Patti Smith, Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, Wayne County, the Beach Boys, Sam and Dave, Abba, Robert Mapplethorpe (photographer) _

_**Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber:** Jesus Christ, Superstar_

_**Chapter Six:- (in which it gets even more confusing)**_

_**Atomic Rooster: **Devil's Answer_

_**The Crazy World of Arthur Brown: **(I am the God of Hellfire, and I Bring You) Fire! _

_**Pink Floyd; See Emily Play**_

_**Fleetwood Mac (first lineup) **Oh Well, The Green Manalishi With The Two-Pronged Crown, Black Magic Woman_

_**Fleetwood Mac (second lineup, with those women) **Rhiannon_

_**The Stilettos, a.k.a the Edda Gentile Band, a.k.a. The Angel and the Serpent (an obscure band fronted by a strikingly blonde girl called Deborah) : **X-Offender, Rip Her To Shreds, Dreaming _

_**Oaxaca, a.k.a. the Stalk Forrest Group, a.k.a. St Cecaelia, a.k.a. the Soft White Underbelly (a band just on the brink of realising how badly it needs a a cöwbell player) : **Sinful Love, Imaginos (a Concept), We Gotta Get Out Of This Place (Animals cover), The Golden Age of Leather, ME 262, Dominance and Submission, Subhuman, Astronomy (A Star), Celestial The Queen, Seven Screaming Dizbusters, and, er... _

_**The Patti Smith Group: G**loria (Van Morrison cover), Piss Factory, Babelogue, Rock And Roll Nigger, Privilege(Set Me Free)._

_And **jus****t** the right music for one of those new-fangled in-care tape players (in 1974)_

**_Queen: _**_Seven Seas of Rhye_

**And remember, kiddies: Non Timetus Messor. **


End file.
